Transportation

Transportation infrastructure, part of the Networks of National Interest, is crucial to economic growth and managing the needs of the Country System. Characterized by significant structural complexity, these networks include monitoring systems that facilitate the movement of people and goods. 
These networks are interconnected across national borders and vital to economic and geopolitical stability. Italy's geography, with its limited north-south extension, makes these networks vulnerable to disruptions that can have significant repercussions. The scarcity of land borders with respect to coastlines also requires the use of marine and air interconnections, with varying costs and performance. These characteristics make transportation networks very critical to the economy and stability of our Country System, requiring careful management and effective responses to mitigate the risks associated with malfunctions and shutdowns. 

To ensure the efficiency and safety of transportation networks, the capabilities of prediction, prevention and management of anomalies, based on:

1. Domain and Process Expertise: In-depth knowledge of infrastructure operation and analysis of relevant events. 

2. Advanced Technologies: Artificial intelligence, intelligent process automation, digital twins and supercomputing (Leonardo HPC, Lutech reference for Cineca) support informed decisions and emergency simulations. 

Using AI and Digital Twin, inefficiencies and issues in transportation infrastructure can be analyzed and solutions proposed to improve performance, safety, and resilience. These technologies enable optimized resource management and effective emergency response.

Digital twins can enable, simplify, and make the transition to smart roads more pervasive and comprehensive by enabling real-time monitoring of the functional and physical state of the infrastructure, using the resulting information to improve its management, maintenance, and operation.  

These technologies also enable an overall streamlining of flows and loads, reducing peaks and troughs or service limitations related to maintenance, making the existing network more efficient and thus decreasing the need to build new infrastructure or upgrades, and adapting routes according to real-time changes in behavior.

The role of AI, combined with digital twins, plays a crucial role throughout the lifecycle of the transport and mobility infrastructure of the Italian System, fulfilling a specific task at each stage of the management process, thanks to the ability to analyze huge amounts of data accurately to optimize its use and strengthen its security:  

• In the planning phase of new infrastructure and extensions of existing infrastructure, AI is used to manage traffic flows and urban growth with a view to environmental sustainability and mobility support.

• In the design phase, in line with balancing innovation, cost efficiency and environmental impact, AI fulfills the prescriptive analysis for new designs.

• In the construction phase, the need is for analysis and management of delays, overestimated costs and safety risks, so digital twins are used to analyze and simulate the impacts of natural and geopolitical events, design changes and regulatory changes.  

• In the monitoring, operation, and maintenance phases, these technologies are used for governance of infrastructure maintenance, inefficiencies, and unexpected disruptions through intelligent monitoring with predictive analysis of possible anomalies and simulations of geo-seismic events and traffic.

Specifically, the use of these technologies enables the optimization of aspects of environmental sustainability, citizen and freight transportation: 

• environmental sustainability: analysis of large volumes of environmental data to assess the impact of an infrastructure on the environment using, e.g., AI design systems that suggest design changes to minimize environmental impact 

• city transportation: real-time dynamic planning of transportation routes and schedules through e.g., AI solutions that vary transportation schedules and frequency based on actual service turnout and digital customer experience solutions aimed at improving the quality and simplifying the user experience across various digital touch points. 

• freight transport: optimizing traffic and freight handling by improving utilization of intermodal platforms, delivery planning, and safety e.g., through digital port twins for freight flow simulation and hazard identification

Lutech also offers transportation customers cybersecurity services and solutions, an increasingly business-critical area given the growing convergence between the IT and OT worlds, cloud services to reduce the cost of infrastructure management and the time-to-market of new services and applications, to networking solutions that are increasingly "software defined" and can adapt the performance of their network to the criticality of individual applications.

Lutech is also one of the members of MOST, the National Center for Sustainable Mobility, a project funded under the NNRP that unites some 50 stakeholders active in the transport and infrastructure sectors (universities, research centers and industrial players) with the goal of accompanying the twin transition with new solutions, new systems capable of making the mobility system safer with digital products and processes to foster smart management, monitoring and predictive maintenance, reducing fatal accidents.

Through its participation in MOST, Lutech adds a new piece to its strategy of developing smart city solutions. Within the National Center for Sustainable Mobility, Lutech brings its expertise in AI/ML and the development of high-performance simulation models (leveraging High Performance Computing) as well as its experiences, including at the international level, on the use of Urban Mobility and Environmental Sustainability platforms.

And it is in this context that Lutech's 5G Port project, in collaboration with the University of Naples Federico II, University of Naples 'Parthenope' - DISAQ and University of Salerno, funded by the European Union under the PNRR, was born. 
The solution aims to deploy a 5G infrastructure in the container terminal at the Port of Salerno to optimize sustainable port operations and create a digital twin of port infrastructure. Lutech brings its expertise in Multi-Agent simulation to assess logistics performance, energy consumption and emissions to transform the Salerno Container Terminal into a safer, more efficient and technologically advanced hub.

Lutech Digital AirPort, a new entity of the Lutech Group created by the acquisition of the AIS (Airport Information Services) company of the SEA Group, Aeroporti di Milano, was recently born. 
Lutech Group will support SEA in innovative projects in the areas of Cloud Transformation and 5G, with a special focus on the 2026 Olympics that will see Milan and Lombardy as protagonists.

In the airport field, in addition to SEA, Lutech has long been working with the main Italian companies in the sector, creating application solutions for access control to airport areas, process optimization and integration of ERP, CRM and WorkForce Management solutions.