The Consortium for the Research in Automation and Telecommunications (C.R.A.T., https://www.crat.eu/) is a no profit research consortium aimed at boosting technological transfer from universities to the private sector. More specifically, from the academic point of view, three Universities are currently associated with CRAT. From the industrial point of view, Thales Alenia Space IT is a member of the Consortium, and we had the chance to collaborate with companies such as ArianeGroup, Vitrociset, Telespazio, Leonardo and ENEA.

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CRAT applied research is focused on Telecommunication Systems, both terrestrial and satellite ones, Computer Systems and Energy Systems. The CRAT’s research group experience in innovative European projects is proved by more than 40 funded projects at a European level and many others at national level.

The aerospace and sector, as well as energy and sustainability aspects, represent a strategic aspect for CRAT, and we have been involved in many European projects in this sector. In the following we provide a brief description of the most interesting projects in these sectors. SESAME, 2019-2022, (https://sesame-space.eu/). Within this project, CRAT’s main activities focused on the development of an intelligent adaptive logistics tool to improve the efficiency of integration activities in the Kourou spaceport. ARIES, 2020-2021, https://business.esa.int/projects/aries. Coordinated by us, our main activities concerned the development of AI-enabled fire detection mechanisms exploiting satellite images and guaranteeing enhanced emergency communications by integrating terrestrial and satellite telecommunication channels. 5G-ALLSTARS, 2018-2021, https://5g-allstar.eu/. As scientific coordinators, our main activities consisted in the development of multi-RAT algorithms allowing to integrate terrestrial and satellite telecommunication networks. H2020 5G-SOLUTIONS, 2019-2022, https://5gsolutionsproject.eu/. We coordinate the vertical use case on energy and we lead the development of smart charging algorithms for electric vehicles and industrial demand side management systems, in cooperation with EnelX and Iren. FP7 MOBINCITY, 2012-2015, https://ses.jrc.ec.europa.eu/mobincity. We focused on the development of optimal multi-modal route planning including EVs, and on smart charging control algorithms, in cooperation with EnelX. We have developed and tested the algorithms in real operational environment systems.

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The projects and research activities carried out by the CRAT research group produced a huge number of scientific publications. The CRAT research group actively disseminates European projects’ results in several courses held in Sapienza University of Rome (the most ancient university in Rome and the biggest university in Europe). We strongly believe in our scientific and academic mission and thus engage students with state-of-the-art methodologies and industrial solutions.