On 6 December 2023, OLGA project was back at the European Parliament, at the invitation of MEP István UJHELYI (Group of the Progressive Alliance of Socialists and Democrats in the European Parliament), and with the participation of the European Climate, Infrastructure and Environment Executive Agency (CINEA – European Commission). For its 2nd anniversary, OLGA presented its innovations for transport landside, accessibility, and multimodality for green airports and regions.
"The success of OLGA project shows how the EU institutions could work together with the regions, academia, and the airports efficiently. The existing network through the achieved results, could facilitate more green investments and new types of connectivity between airports and cities."
-István Ujhelyi, Member of the European Parliament
In two years since the project commenced, OLGA project was showcased at various events, such as the Paris Air Show, Passenger Terminal Expo (twice), NACO Sustainable Aviation Summit, Connecting Europe Days, Sustainable Aviation Futures Europe, Transport Research Arena. OLGA also delivered several in-house events, such as the workshop on waste management strategies and technologies held in Cluj, the technical seminar held in Paris, a high-level discussion on hydrogen in Milan, and many others, including the previous event at the European Parliament in 2022 hosted by MEP Jean-Marian Marinescu.
In terms of deliverables, OLGA continued its contribution to the implementation of the EU Green Deal by paving the way towards greener aviation via its sustainable and innovative solutions supporting biodiversity, air quality, circularity, and sustainable aviation fuel. Moreover, as Yannael Billard, OLGA Project Sponsor and Senior Manager in Environment and Energy at Groupe ADP, highlighted: through its diverse achievements, OLGA is an accelerator for the energy hub and intermodal hub concepts, thanks to its activities on energy efficiency and green airport operations and buildings, green and smart logistics, as well as integration with other low-emission transport modes, in particular rail.
The event on the 6th of December 2023, at the European Parliament, gave the floor to the activities performed in OLGA’s Work Package 2 on transport landside, access and multimodal solutions. This WP is led by Zagreb Airport, with the main objective to shape green airports as multimodal hubs, while optimising passenger and freight flows for low-emission mobility and improved city integration for airports. In this sense, IT solutions for the optimisation of e-buses and multimodal traffic optimisation are being developed, based on a transport demand and supply analysis to and from the OLGA airports and through data fusion from three different sources (airport data, telecom data, public transport data). Both IT solutions will be applied and demonstrated at Paris, Milan, Zagreb, and Cluj airports and will foster less polluting and optimised transport operations as well as improve access and multimodal connections to and from the airport.
Regarding the rail-air intermodality in OLGA project, Groupe ADP and the Technical University of Cluj are carrying out a study to improve the quality of service to simplify the journey of connecting passengers between rail and air transportation. OLGA is also improving cargo delivery by train, connecting the airport to the city centre. SEA Milan and the Interuniversity Consortium for Organisation and Operations Research (ICOOR) are working on the development of SPOT (Smart Parcels on Train). This is a project for the smart delivery of small air freight via rail from Malpensa airport to Milan downtown and vice versa, which helps reduce the number of trucks on the highways from Milano Malpensa airport to Milan in the hinterland of Milan, with the ultimate goal of reducing pollution.
Many more OLGA deliverables are in the pipeline to reduce the environmental impact of the aviation sector. More will be presented at OLGA’s upcoming event in Zagreb on 13 December 2023: OLGA EU Green Deal project: Shaping Green Airports & Smart Cities. The project runs until 2026 and it is expected that OLGA outputs will generate a lasting impact beyond this scope.