The first DISCO General Assembly of 2025 was held online over two productive days, on 26th and 27th March 2025. This virtual gathering brought together all project partners to reflect on recent achievements, share key updates, and align on the next steps for the project’s development.
A central highlight of the meeting was the progress made on the Meta Model Suite. This essential tool is now available, with its user interface design fully completed. Its launch marks a major milestone for the project and sets the stage for broader implementation across partner activities.
The spotlight also turned to the Starring Living Labs, as their implementation phase approaches its conclusion at the end of April 2025. Each lab provided an in-depth presentation of their work to date, showcasing innovative solutions, lessons learned, and the impact generated within their local contexts. Their insights are helping shape the foundation for the next phase of the project.
Attention is now gradually shifting towards the Twinning Living Labs, which are preparing to build on the experiences of their Starring counterparts. They, too, shared updates on their progress and outlined their upcoming plans, highlighting the growing momentum across the DISCO network.
In addition, key contributions were made by POLIS, ALICE, and Rupprecht Consult, who presented their efforts to build strong connections between DISCO and other relevant European projects. They also provided a recap of recent training sessions delivered as part of the knowledge-sharing and capacity-building activities.
Strategic links have been established with several prominent initiatives, including:
GREENLOG, deployEMDS, DECARBOMILE, ACUMEN, URBANE, SENATOR, and UNCHAIN. These collaborations are helping to expand the reach and impact of DISCO, while fostering synergies across the mobility and logistics innovation ecosystem.
Lastly, the DISCO Knowledge Platform continues to grow, offering a central hub for insights, resources, and updates from the project. The platform is publicly accessible here and serves as a valuable tool for stakeholders and the broader community.
As DISCO progresses through 2025, the General Assembly reaffirmed the commitment of all partners to collaboration, innovation, and achieving lasting impact in urban logistics and mobility.
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VIU_TeDIS is one of the partners of the DISCO project financed by the Horizon Europe Program.
Aims
DISCO aims at fast-tracking upscaling to a new generation of urban logistics and smart planning; enabling the transition to decarbonised and digital cities, delivering innovative frameworks and tools, and changing the Urban Logistics and Planning paradigm with a Physical Internet (PI) – led approach.
DISCO solutions are designed involving all stakeholders (e.g., cities, logistics service providers, retailers, real estate/public and private infrastructure owners, transport operators, research and technical community, civil society) together driving a paradigm change from sprawl to freight-efficient, zero-emission and nearby-delivery-based models.
DISCO is committed to pooling innovation capacity of urban logistics actors, so that the whole sector would be able to untap a huge amount of data-driven efficiency and sustainability potential, thus generating new values.
Partnership
DISCO involves 48 partners from 12 countries (Italy, Denmark, Germany, Greece, Spain, United Kingdom, France, Netherlands, Belgium, Finland, Denmark Sweden, Czech Republic) including the federated community of logistics service providers, mobility and technology providers, real estate and infrastructure owners and cities supported by specialised consulting, EU associations and academics.
DISCO partners and stakeholders will co-design, deploy, demonstrate, evaluate, and replicate innovative, inclusive, hyperconnected and data-driven urban logistics and planning solutions. The resulting dynamic and optimal space re-allocation, integrating urban freight within an efficiently operated network-of-networks, exploiting underused lands and assets, will include both fixed and mobile infrastructure, based on throughput demands.
VIU Role
VIU is the cooridnator of the Padua Living Lab implementation: Dynamic urban space re-allocation adopting modular lockers and coordinated network in real-time with logistics service providers.
Together with VIU:
_Padua Municipality, as Institution responsible for the SULP (Sustainable Urban Logistics Planning) development and policies, will be the host of the Lab;
_NEXT, the innovative and advanced transport system developed by Getplus Srl, using electrically powered modular vehicles, will be the technological partner.
The aim of the Living Lab is to phisically develop an urban logistics network based on urban spaces, strategically allocated to micro hubs and dynamic lockers and to digitally collect real-time data as decision making tools of freight demand allocation to urban transport capacity in the last mile.
PROJECT INFO
Project duration: 42 months from May 2023
Lead partner: FIT consulting Srl
This project is funded by Horizon Europe Program.
The sole responsibility of this publication lies with the author.
The European Commission is not responsible for any news that may be made of the information therein.
