The network

SafeTRANS links industrial and academic stakeholders in the area of processes and methods for the development of complex, safety-critical systems in transportation (automobile, aircraft, railway). SafeTRANS defines cross-sector harmonised research agendas, implements them through a multitude of R&D projects, and supports fast technology transfer. The goal is to ensure that today's high safety standards can be maintained and, where necessary, raised in the future, in spite of growing traffic density, growing complexity of systems and shorter innovation cycles.

Main activities

SafeTRANS brings together key industrial (e.g. Airbus Germany, Bosch, Continental Teves, Daimler and Siemens) and academic (e.g. German Aerospace Center DLR, Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft FhG, OFFIS Institute for Information Technology, Universities of Bremen and Oldenburg) players. Our main activities are
- to develop strategic research agendas in the area of processes and methods for the development of embedded systems in transportation, harmonised between sectors as well as on a national and a European level,
- to implement these strategic research agendas by supporting the application process, the partner search, and quality assurance for R&D project proposals,
- to ensure the sustainability of project results and their availability to further projects,
- to support technology transfer, especially to SMEs,
- to find and exploit cross-sector synergy potentials and encourage "best practice" sharing by networking partners from different transportation sectors,
- to integrate SMEs in these processes by supplying all relevant information and networking them with large-scale industries and academia, and
- to increase the visibility of the cluster.

The technological focus

Highlights

SafeTRANS facilitates cooperation between industrial and academic partners, identifies cross-domain synergies and enables the transfer of best practices between domains.

To realise national and European R&D goals, SafeTRANS supports its members in compiling and harmonising R&D strategies, identifies research priority themes and feeds them into national and European funding programmes. On a national level, SafeTRANS coordinates the creation of an Embedded Systems roadmap in co-operation with the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF). On a European level, SafeTRANS maintains strong cooperative ties with the two French Pôles de Compétitivité Aerospace Valley und System@tic Paris-Region to implement the ARTEMIS Innovation Cluster EICOSE. In this context, SafeTRANS drives the harmonisation of priority themes for the Strategic Research Agenda and Multi Annual Strategic Plan of the ARTEMIS Joint Undertaking as well as for the ITEA2 roadmap.

In addition, SafeTRANS supports project incubation and consortium formation for its members. An example project in ARTEMIS is CESAR – Cost Efficient methods and processes for SAfety Relevant ES, with more than 50 project partners and more than 56 million euros total expenditure.

Knowledge transfer and networking are made possible by the biannual SafeTRANS Industrial Day, which features top-class presentations from industry and research and provides ample room for discussions and cross-domain knowledge transfer.