SIMBA II holds Brazilian workshop on ITS

Creation date: 15 December 2009

The meeting in Sao Paulo highlighted areas of future cooperation between the EU and Brazil

The SIMBA II project aims to increase RTD cooperation between the EU and its international cooperation partners: Brazil, China, India, Russia and South Africa. In order to realise this objective, SIMBA II organises a number of expert working group meetings, the latest two of which were held on 18 November 2009 in Moscow, Russia, and 25 November in São Paulo, Brazil.

The workshop in Brazil was organised in conjunction with AEA (Brazilian Association for Automotive Engineering), and was opened by Frederic Sgarbi, Head of the "Surface Transport Unit” DG Research, European Commission. The objectives were to discuss Brazil’s ITS research needs and identify and prioritise cooperation areas between Brazil and the EU in the context of the Seventh Framework Programme.

After introductory presentations on the SIMBA II project and objectives by Irina Silva (Project Support Manager, ERTICO) and ITS standardisation by Vincent Blervaque (Director of Development and Deployment, ERTICO), the workshop explored the topics of urban mobility, fleet management tracking and improving ITS education, before moving on to a public session on future cooperation between the EU and Brazil and supply chain security.

The workshop came was well timed, being two days before the Meeting of the Committee for the Science and Technologic Cooperation between Brazil and the EU which included transport among its topics. The discussions of the SIMBA II workshop were highly relevant and helped to shape the research agenda in the ITS arena.

Access the workshop presentations and minutes