OREANDA-NEWS. August 30, 2012.  Hitachi Europe Ltd, today announced that it will coordinate a project funded by the European Commission within the FP7 Work Programme 2011 COOPERATION of the European Commission under Grant agreement no : 314411, via its Information and Communication Technologies R&D Laboratory (ICTL), addressing the objective GC-ICT-2011.6.8 ICT for fully electric vehicles. The estimated Overall Cost is 4,265,317 Euro, and the EC Funding is : 2,960,000 Euro.

The project is named eCo-FEV, for "efficient Cooperative infrastructure for Fully Electric Vehicles", and aims at developing an integrated IT electric mobility platform that enables the connection and information exchanges between multiple infrastructure systems that are relevant to the Fully Electric Vehicle (FEV) such as road IT infrastructure, Electric Vehicle (EV) backend infrastructure and EV charging infrastructure. Over this platform, multiple advanced electric mobility services are able to be provided to FEV users to improve the energy management efficiency and usability of the FEV, e.g. in the context of Smart Cities.

The electric mobility cooperative platform is an intermediate platform between use cases and FEV end users. It is the objective of the eCo-FEV project to propose an open architecture in order to enable the extensibility and flexibility of the eCo-FEV concept in the follow up deployment in different implementation situations, e.g. implementation site local requirements, specific use case requirements, client requirements etc. This architecture provides a flexible coupling between user services, infrastructure systems and FEVs by a common platform that provides common facilities.

eCo-FEV will start on September 1st 2012 and it will last for 33 months. There are 12 other project Partners: Commissariat а l'Energie Atomique et aux Energies Alternatives (France), Centro Ricerche Fiat S.C.p.A. (Italy), European Center for Information and Communication Technologies GmbH (Germany), Politecnico di Torino (Italy), Renault SAS represented by GIE REGIENOV (France), Technische Universitдt Berlin (Germany), Societа Italiana Traforo Autostradale del Frejus S.p.A. (Italy), BlueThink S.p.A. (Italy), Facit Research GmbH & Co. KG (Germany), Conseil gйnйral de l'Isиre (France), ENERGRID S.p.A. (Italy), Schulz - Institute for Economic Research and Consulting GmbH (Germany).

Hitachi's contribution to the project will be mainly in the areas of advanced Car Information Systems and Services, as this is an area where Hitachi Automotive Systems, Ltd. has major strengths.

ICTL of Hitachi Europe was or is Partner in several EC- or national-funded project, like GeoNet, iTETRIS, PRE-DRIVE C2X, COVEL, PRISM, AutoI, Secricom, Phosphorus, DRIVE C2X and SCORE@F.