SUP&R ITN outreach magazine SUP&R ITN features in FIRM magazine - Jun2014 | Page 4

EDITORIAL INTERNATIONAL COLLABORATION AND IMPLEMENTATION OF RESULTS Welcome to the fourth issue of FEHRL’s Infrastructure Research Magazine (FIRM), which outlines how FEHRL provides transport infrastructure solutions for current and future challenges with its fifth Strategic European Road Research Programme (SERRP V) and flagship Forever Open Road (FOR) and FORx4 programmes. In this issue, we highlight international cooperation and the implementation and exploitation of results as key themes as I believe, after my first six months as Secretary General of FEHRL, that these are two of FEHRL’s key strengths. In the articles you can read about how FEHRL is linking up with the USA with the ECOLABEL project (page 13) and Ukraine in INCRIS (page 18). We are also in the process of bringing to life the Cooperative Agreement signed with our Associate member FHWA through the work being done in the current Infravation (www.infravation.net) and MIRIAM (miriam-co2.net) programmes. Since its inception in 1989, FEHRL has gained extensive experience in supporting and managing European projects, in particular those offered by our key stakeholders - the European Commission (EC) and the Conference of European Directors of Road (CEDR). Our role has mostly covered technical guidance and dissemination, but we are now in the process of opening up our capability to support the implementation and exploitation of results as it is essential to the overall success of transport infrastructure research. We give several examples of work being carried out to implement and exploit projects throughout this issue. Our flagship Forever Open road programme (page 7) is building a framework of how past, present and future projects fit seamlessly together to bring the vision to life. Meanwhile, work is ongoing to analyse project implementation in the FOSTER-Road project (page 10). And while the ROSANNE project (page 12) follows directly on from the results gained in TYROSAFE and other related projects, SMARTRAIL (page 16) contains work done in the preceding SAMARIS and ARCHES projects. Many of these FEHRL programmes and projects featured recently at TRA2014 in April 2014 and you can read all about this lively event here on pages 6-7. Thank you so much to our member IFSTTAR, who was behind the whole organisation of this excellent fifth edition of TRA, and we wish good luck to IBDiM, who will be the main partner of the Polish Ministry of Infrastructure and Development in organising TRA2016 in two years’ time in Warsaw, Poland. Polish stand at TRA2014 FEHRL also congratulates VTI and UCD for winning the EU Champions of Transport Research competition that was given out at TRA2014 as part of the TRA Visions project and you can read more about this on page 9. Thierry Goger FEHRL Secretary General ([email protected]) For more information,