The ambitions target set by government to end the sale of fossil fuel vehicles by 2030 puts significant pressure on UK's charge point infrastructure to be ready and easily accessible for current and future EV owners. The current reality however is very different. There are not enough public charge points available to boost EV user confidence in EV uptake and those available often offer poor user experience, increasing user anxiety and causing frustration of EV users. At the same time, low utilisation of public charge point infrastructure remains a major issue for a charge point provider profitability, making a business case for rapid EV charge point rollout difficult. A key area to break this chicken and egg situation is to drastically improve EV user experience at public charge points and boost the confidence of EV users (current & future) in the UK. EV users want to be able to secure a charging bay whenever they require and plan their daily journey without any hassle. Operators of charge points want to maximise utilisation of these to increase profits and to ensure that their infrastructure can satisfy existing demand. Reserve&Charge leverages recent innovation in smart parking technologies and brings these to EV charging infrastructures, integrating real-time data and novel service capabilities. Specific innovations focus on reliable occupancy detection at charge points, pre-booking of charging bays across multiple CPOs, automation of enforcement for operators, overstay notifications for users and automatic payments. The resulting system benefits both EV users and parking infrastructure owners/operators: EV users have greater certainty to acquire a public charging point and peace of mind when planning their journey. It also improves the payment process by giving EV users advanced warning to avoid overpayment due to overstay and an automated payment process. Benefits for the charge point owner are improved enforcement by automatic detection of violations and optimised charge point utilisation. The proposed solution is applicable to a wider range of public charging scenarios. Our initial market focus is on commuters, including disabled drivers, at train station park & ride (P&R) car parks and transportation service providers. This is in line with the UK Road to Zero strategy (2018) stating: "In particular, train station car parks hold an opportunity for more destination charge points". TfWM Park+Ride car parks are ideal for the planned Reserve&Charge demonstrations and user acceptance tests. The identified market opportunity offers significant growth potential over the next decade.

This project addresses the urgent need for transport operators to be able to efficiently implement social distancing on their tram/rail services amid current COVID-19 restrictions and to optimally manage demand, access and transport capacity at peak-times in the long-term. The UK government reported transport use is down by more than 60% for all transport types since February. Rail and Tube use are down by 97% \[Coronavirus press conference: 15 April 2020\]. This is having significant impact on operators' revenue and commercial viability \[TfWM, 2020\]. Operators have significant financial and societal motivation to bring passenger numbers and revenues up again asap, but gradually, once lockdown starts to step down whilst maintaining social distance on trams/trains. Accelogress proposes to develop and demonstrate an innovative public transport service resource management solution as an extension to our best-in-class existing Save-a-Space (SAS) real-time parking management platform, to be deployed initially at the Midlands Metro tram (6m passengers in 2018/2019) in partnership with TfWM. Such an approach was also suggested elsewhere, acknowledging that "Criteria and strategies" need to be developed "for a gradual return to normality beyond the acute restrictions that have been imposed on basic rights such as the freedom of movement," the researchers at the Leopoldina National Academy of Sciences in Germany write in a position paper. Furthermore: "... Travel, both business and private, could also be resumed under those circumstances. The scientists recommend that the greatest possible distance needs to be created between people on trains, planes and buses and that masks should be worn covering the mouth and nose. In the case of German national railway Deutsche Bahn ... the company could establish a reservation system that ensures that a certain number of rows of seats between passengers are kept free." \[SPIEGEL news site 14/04/20: http://tiny.cc/1bo6mz\] The extension for impact will allow this project to increase the speed to market with a combination of specific commercial activities, product market fit testing with end-users, help identify additional funding for product development, explore further markets for the innovation.

Save-a-Space provides an effective means to drivers to plan or instantaneously find the most suitable parking spaces at their destination, allow them to make guaranteed bookings and automate the entire process such as payment on their smart phone. Save-a-Space key strengths are that it provides service providers, such as Centro as part of this challenge, with an integrated solution that monitors the usage of parking spaces and the identity of customers to manage parking operation parameters in real-time from ANPR data in a secure cloud-based back-end, and user friendly interfaces to the service provider and drivers.

The objective of this project is to conduct a comprehensive technology and user acceptance feasibility study of the SPPeX system concept, a novel system to significantly improve efficiency of parking management in towns. It will assess the impacts of relaying real-time parking information to town-centre users, providing a better experience when planning their trip to the high street, during their journey and it will determine how parking can be best integrated into high street business offers. This will reduce the inconvenience of inadequate or hard-to-locate parking spots at the high street – a recognised barrier to potential shoppers. As identified in the Portas Review “To go head to head with the out-of-town shopping centres, high streets need to have a more flexible, well communicated parking offer.” The envisioned solution is expected to collect and integrate real-time parking spaces availability data from different available sources, combine them with parking demand data gathered from users of the system to generate a town wide parking availability and demand model that is constantly updated. Beyond this, the study will demonstrate how this information can be leveraged while guiding users to their destination, helping to reduce congestion caused by drivers looking and waiting for available parking. The proposed solution will operate in the cloud with a user interface on modern Android or Apple’s iOS smartphones. The system will be integrated with advanced mobile location services, which users are increasingly accepting and expecting. Easy availability of space information will reduce the parking concerns of potential high-street users and partially eliminate the advantage that out-of-town centres have by providing unlimited parking.

The objective of this proposal is to conduct a comprehensive market analysis and assess the commercial viability of a novel system to significantly improve the efficiency of parking management systems. This system would develop a hybrid sensor technology and secure communications and management environment to fully automate operation of parking facilities in urban areas. The innovation stems from combining elements of recent research on Sensor- and Intelligent Transport- Systems (at the University of Surrey), that the applicant has founded a company to exploit and will leverage ongoing developments in Internet of Things ecosystem platforms. The system is expected to collect real-time information of the available parking spaces, match to the users’ demand, and execute the financial transactions with minimum user/operator intervention. The proposed solution is particularly designed to operate on a mobile application platform and integrate with advanced mobile location services, which users are increasingly accepting and expecting. In terms of the impacts, the objective of the system is to significantly reduce the time spent by the drivers to locate parking spots, make reservations, and complete payment transactions in a pervasive manner. In addition, parking operators will benefit by increasing the utilization of their facilities and reducing the operation costs. Finally, the proposed solution will effectively help councils to mitigate the congestion that results from search of parking spaces by the drivers in urban areas.