Workers in the transport sector are undergoing great changes, bringing challenging situations, but also new opportunities. The WE-TRANSFORM second stakeholder forum workshop unveiled many potential barriers and gaps brought about by transport automation and digitalization. It also highlighted initiatives and potential ways to deal with the new situations and make opportunities out of them. In the end, the most important remains the well-being of the workers, transport users, and all citizens.

In this second workshop, nearly one year after the kickoff of the project, an update on the research advancement was given. Considering the project duration is 3 years, and investigation as well as stakeholder consultation is the core activity, this work is still ongoing, and results are not yet public. Therefore, the workshop partners firstly reminded the structure of the research process and stakeholder involvement, before announcing first results, and finally stimulating knowledge creation in focus groups.

RESEARCH PROCESS AND TOOLS

The project coordinator, Cristina Pronello from POLITO, described the method to shape the research process, the Living Hub: it is a space (both online and in meetings) for key stakeholders of all transport modes to gather knowledge on best practices, understand challenges, and collect sectoral labor requirements. These key stakeholders include researchers, decision makers, trade unions, workers’ associations, and industry representatives, among others.

A very important tool used in the living hub is the Artificial Intelligence Tool. It leverages on artificial intelligence to collect papers and scientific resources in massive quantity, gathering a large amount of existing knowledge related to transport workers’ transitions. This tool has been developed and is already being used by the POLITO research team involved in WE-TRANSFORM.

Another key tool was announced during the workshop introduction: a survey to collect more inputs from stakeholders, launched during the second workshop. The survey focuses on stakeholders’ perceptions of gaps, barriers and opportunities for transport workers related to services automation and digitalization. It includes questions on individual experiences and more general aspects. The link to fill out the survey is still active on our website.

PRELIMINARY RESULTS OF THE RESEARCH

Yannis Tyrinopoulos from the University of West Attica presented the preliminary findings of the inventory analysis of actions and initiatives related to transport automation.

1. He first defined the different transport and related sectors investigated, and the sources of knowledge used (the AI tool outcomes, WE-T partners inputs, results from the 1st Stakeholder Forum workshop).
2. He then gave a few examples of transport automation processes:

• Border control systems in airports
• Baggage handling at airports
• Container management in port terminals

These examples were confronted with the 5 automation stages in intralogistics systems developed by logistics researchers in 2021. This highlighted the common features in automation processes across various goods and person transport services.

3. After that, jobs automation investigations were presented:

• In the transport sector, manufacturing jobs are the ones being automated first.
• Automation affects jobs differently in function of the interaction level with machines and the type of skills required.
• There is a skill mismatch between workers and their jobs in a large part of jobs in the EU

4. Finally, the digital transformation consequences on jobs in the EU were shown, drawn from an EU report of 2019 recommending specific policy solutions.

These findings will be included in the WE-TRANSFORM Report of actions and initiatives related to transport automation and other transitions (Deliverable 3.1). This report will be ready in April 2022. Specific insights will be progressively published on the project’s Knowledge base, to be found on the WE-TRANSFORM website in the coming months.

KNOWLEDGE CREATION IN FOCUS GROUPS

After that, participants were divided in smaller groups for a focused discussion allowing knowledge creation. In total, five focus groups took place: three in English, one in Italian, and one in Greek. While four focus groups were held completely online, the Italian focus group was hybrid. This enabled the involvement of local stakeholders and a more spontaneous exchange with no language barriers. Each group included participants from diverse backgrounds (different transport modes, different stakeholder category representative, etc.).

The main questions addressed in all groups were the following:

1. Which kind of barriers have you observed to the introduction and increase of digitalization or automation? What are the key gaps to cover: ethics, economic concerns, meaningful work, and the value of achievement, rising prosperity, …?
2. Are you aware of any initiative to facilitate the transition towards an increased automation/digitalization? What conclusions can be drawn from these initiatives?

Participants provided several relevant inputs. Together with discussion results, they were collected in reports to be exploited together with survey results.

CONCLUSION

Finally, after a nice networking lunch with onsite participants, a common session supported the exchange of inputs between all focus groups. It helped conclude on most pressing barriers to address and investigate in the project. This session also completed the state-of-the-art started with literature review presented in the morning session.

We would like to thank all participants for their active contributions to our project. We are looking forward to exploiting the results of this second productive stakeholder forum workshop.

And we will work hard to provide further insights for an even richer discussion at the next meeting, in June 2022 in Riga, Latvia!