Autonomous and Connected vehicles for CleaneR Air (ACCRA)

UK Government AQ strategy states that there are over 50,000 premature deaths yearly due to AQ pollution. Emissions from transport are a key contributor to poor AQ. Vehicles which have an internal combustion engine and an electric only range can offer zero emission (ZE) operation but cities lack the ability to monitor and control the vehicles. Project ACCRA - a collaboration between Dynniq, Tevva, EarthSense, Transport Systems Catapult, Cenex and Leeds City Council - will address this problem by developing a system capable of allowing remote control of a vehicles energy management system to ensure ZE operation where it has maximum benefit to AQ. The operation will be demonstrated in a proposed Clean Air Zone in Leeds. Under the overall management of the Transport Systems Catapult, the consortium will develop a hybrid vehicle interface (Tevva), a decision-making engine (Dinniq) capable of taking inputs from a range of city data, such as live air quality information (EarthSense) potentially triggering on-demand ZE running instructions (known as active geofencing). The application, markets, business models and scalability of the system will be evaluated by Cenex and the Transport Systems Catapult to inform Leeds and other CAZ cities of the its potential use.