EU: HeERO project launched; 9 countries to lay foundation for eCall
08 Feb 2011
HeERO, the pan European project for eCall deployment pilots, held its kick-off meeting at ERTICO - ITS Europe on 18 January. During (the next) three years, the nine European countries forming the HeERO consortium will carry out the start-up on an interoperable and harmonised 112 based in-vehicle emergency call system.
They are all sharing the same high-level objective: prepare the local e112 eCall infrastructure necessary for the provision of a sustainable eCall service for the European citizens and share their experiences with the other EU Members and Associated States.
Italy, Germany, Romania, Czech Republic, Greece, The Netherlands, Croatia, Finland and Sweden are the nine countries that will implement, test and operate eCall pre-deployment pilots during the next three years.
In order to prepare for the deployment in Europe of the infrastructure necessary for provision of the eCall service, they will together implement, operate and validate in real-life environments the European eCall agreed standards, the needed technical and operational infrastructure upgrades and the value-added services that can be linked to the eCall open platform.
HeERO will also carry out a task for the certification and homologation tests and procedures for the eCall systems and end-to-end services.
To achieve these tasks, the HeERO consortium is built on a European level management led by ERTICO - ITS Europe, and on national teams gathering locally all actors of the eCall service value-chain: the Public Safety Answering Points, the Emergency Management Centres, The Mobile Network Operators, the Fleet Owners, the Private and Public Road Operators and the Car Manufacturers.
The HeERO consortium is commited towards the wide European deployment of eCall, and will therefore share the results of the testing and operations of the pilots with the European Standardisation Organisations for fine-tuning the existing standards, and will the European eCall Implementation Platform for disseminating eCall implementation good practices throughout Europe.
HeERO is a Pilot Type A Project, supported by a 5 M€ funding from the European Commission, Directorate General Information Society and Media under the Competitiveness and Innovation Programme (CIP) - ICT Policy Support Programme (ICT-PSP). It started on 1 January 2011 and will last for 36 months.