The first Modus workshop: The Future of Multimodal Transport: Horizon 2040 was held online on 19 January, attended by almost 90 experts, mainly from the air and rail sectors.

The workshop was divided into two parts: a first session with a focus on multimodality objectives and future scenarios, and a second interactive part focusing on multimodality enablers, followed by a final session to share results and conclusions amongst all the participants.

The first session began with an explanation of Modus’s main goals and workshop objectives by Annika Paul, coordinator of the project. Mengying Fu then shared the findings and analyses conducted within Modus over the past few months, with a particular focus on the results of an expert survey to identify future drivers of demand and supply up to 2040.

Ms Paul concluded the first part of the workshop by highlighting some of the main challenges and opportunities associated with an efficient multimodal European transport system as a way of warming up for the participants’ discussions during the second part.

The objective of the second part of the workshop was to achieve a better understanding of the constraints of and respective enablers for the development of multimodality from various perspectives.

Two different groups were created for each topic to enable a fruitful interactive session focusing on three separate topics:

1. What are the infrastructure needs and respective feasibility?
2. Which business models can support and enable multimodality?
3. What do passengers of the future look like in terms of personalisation, travel services?

The online Mural tool was used during these brainstorming sessions to allow participants to share their ideas online in an interactive way. The groups comprised experts from different backgrounds, ensuring that account was taken of requirements and solutions from different sectors. Colleagues from other SESAR projects, such as X-TEAM D2D and Engage, also joined the groups, as did CleanSky.

The high-level results from each group were shared within the panel with all participants, highlighting several aspects considered essential in terms of moving towards a better multimodal system.

The results from the workshop will help the consortium to identify and assess future drivers of passenger demand and mobility supply in terms of their impact on passenger mode choice. They will also enable the development of multiple scenarios for future mobility paths, taking into account aspects such as new regulatory contexts meeting new environmental standards or new transport operators’ business models, covering a timescale of 2040 and beyond.

The Modus project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 SESAR research and innovation programme on the topic SESAR-ER4-10-2019 ATM Role in Intermodal Transport under grant agreement no. 891166. It started in June 2020 and will run until November 2022.