CALL FOR APPLICATIONS FOR PLANNING GRANTS

Establishing a VREF Centre of Excellence for Managing freight in the urban transport situation.

VREF currently supports eight Centres of Excellence that, together, represent a powerful academic research network in line with the VREF mission statement of How to cope with the complexity of urban transport. The role of the next CoE will be to deal with issues relating to freight in the urban transport situation.

Academic studies of urban transport are concerned primarily with passenger (In this document, a passenger is defined as a traveller in or on a public or private conveyance) transport in the broad sense of the expression. The delivery of goods in urban areas — sometimes called the problem of the last kilometre — is a more recent area of study within the well-established field of freight logistics. While long-haul freight movements now appear to be relatively efficient, urban operations are probably much less so.

The new CoE is intended to focus on the interaction between goods and passenger transport within the urban transport system. Management strategies for increasing the efficiency of both of these activities should be of particular interest to academic researchers, logistics companies and city decision-makers alike.

Management strategies should be addressed jointly by practitioners and academics. The academics should be guided by the problems and policy challenges experienced by the practitioners, while the latter should be guided by the opportunities that academic research can offer practitioners and policy-makers.

Deadline for submission by e-mail to secretariat@vref.se no later than 15 September 2011.

Questions and topics to be addressed

The city (or cities) should address the following two issues in the application:

• Question No. 1:What is the city´s view of freight within the urban transport system?

• Question No. 2: What resources will the city commit to supporting and implementing the academic research programme?

• Theme No. 1: Understanding the interaction between goods and passenger transport in the urban transport situation
• Theme No. 2: Role of private players in managing freight in the urban transport situation
• Theme No. 3: Implementation challenges and the role of public policy in managing freight in the urban transport situation  

Planning grant
The planning grant is intended to facilitate the preparation and production of the full CoE proposal. The amount of the grant will typically be of the order of SEK 200-300 thousand (approximately EUR 23-34 thousand or USD 31-46 thousand), depending on the nature of the project.

Applicant
A VREF Centre of Excellence (CoE) has traditionally been established by a reputable, well-established research group or by a consortium of groups acting in concert, addressing a central problem or problem area within the framework of the Future Urban Transport (FUT) programme.

In this call, VREF invites cities and academic research groups to form project consortia and submit joint planning grant applications. Several cities may cooperate as part of a single consortium, as may researchers from different universities. A consortium may also include other partners, such as freight carriers. The formation of a consortium may be the initiative of a university or a city. Any intellectual property rights issues will have to be addressed within the consortium.

For legal reasons, VREF can fund academic research only. Thus, the application and main applicant (that is, the party designated as project manager) must be associated with and supported by his or her university (see below). For this reason, cities wishing to participate in the consortium will be required to arrange their own funding, as will any other company or organisation wishing to join the project. However, PhD internships in cities and other non-academic organisations may be funded by VREF.

More information and instructions for application will be found in "Details: VREF-Call for Applications & Instructions - Freight-CoE 110301.pdf (pdf, 190 kB)".