Project Start in the Braunschweig Research Car Park

Under the auspices of the newly launched SynCoPark project (synergies from cooperation and standardisation in manufacturer-independent automated parking), researchers from the Technische Universität Braunschweig have joined forces with parking industry representatives to ensure that standardisation of parking processes will soon make autonomous parking (more) widely available.

To achieve this aim, the newly-built, multi-storey research car park at Braunschweig Airport has been equipped with digital infrastructure, turning it into a test area for parking processes at various levels of automation and using specially-equipped research vehicles for real-time demonstrations.

The tests carried out so far have involved standardised hardware and specific vehicle/infrastructure combinations, which have been carefully developed through close cooperation between OEMs, suppliers and infrastructure service providers.

The joint project SynCoPark wants to go the extra mile and develop standardised solutions for the qualification and certification of digital infrastructure in multi-storey car parks and vehicles. This will enable parking processes to be performed at different levels of automation, irrespective of the vehicle manufacturer, infrastructure service provider and car park operator.

This makes it possible not only to design technical equipment for new multi-storey car parks, but also to retrofit existing multi-storey car parks so that they too can also offer automated parking processes.

The project is also focussing on other aspects: The future use of multi-storey car parks as mobility hubs for transporting people and goods will open up new economic opportunities, which will be examined in terms of business field and business model development. The researchers are also considering legal questions, such as requirements for contractual relationships, liability and road user behaviour.

In order to highlight how intermodal transportation hubs can benefit from standardised and advanced infrastructures, the Elbphilharmonie multi-storey car park in Hamburg is to be equipped with this new infrastructure in the run-up to the 2021 ITS World Congress and the project’s achievements are to be on full display to capture the public’s imagination.

The SynCoPark project has received EUR 2.5 million in funding from the Federal Ministry of Transport and Digital Infrastructure’s research programme “Automation and Networking in Road Traffic”.

The consortium is being led by the Automotive Research Centre of Lower Saxony (Niedersächsisches Forschungszentrum Fahrzeugtechnik) (NFF) at the TU Braunschweig, the Institut für Fahrzeugtechnik (IfF), the Institut für Automobilwirtschaft und Industrielle Produktion (AIP) and the Forschungsstelle Mobilitätsrecht. The project’s partners also include APCOA PARKING Deutschland GmbH, EDAG Engineering GmbH, GOLDBECK GmbH, NavCert GmbH and PRETHERM GmbH. The project’s associate partners are Allianz für die Region GmbH, ITS Deutschland GmbH, Leica Geosystems GmbH, Volkswagen AG and the BMW Group.

Find out more at: https://www.its-mobility.de

About APCOA PARKING Group

APCOA PARKING Group is Europe’s leading parking management company with more than 45 years of industry expertise. APCOA Group’s 5,000 employees manage approximately 1.4 million individual parking spaces at over 9,000 locations in 13 European countries. These include parking spaces at 1,800 city and shopping centre locations, 400 hotels, 150 hospitals and 58 European airports. With its consistent “asset light” business model, APCOA is a trusted partner for private and public real estate owners.

APCOA’s advanced IT platform is the interface between its car parks, business customers, partners, car drivers and their vehicles. Thus, APCOA is able to offer its business and end customers innovative services and products to improve the efficiency and comfort of their mobility experience. In addition to the company’s customers, these innovative services also create environmental benefits: APCOA actively contributes to reducing CO2 emissions in cities and at traffic intersections by reducing the volume of traffic searching for parking spaces with the aid of digital services and the company’s intelligent traffic management system.

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