We’re proud to announce that a paper authored by three Future Needs researchers – Anna Palaiologk, Eleftheria Georganti, and Kyriaki Daskaloudi – received the Best Technical Paper Award at the 2025 ITS Congress in Seville.
The awarded paper, titled “Advancing the Sustainable Urban Air Mobility Indicators Framework: Proposing New Non-Core Indicators,” was developed as part of the ImAFUSA project, supported by SESAR JU. In this project, Future Needs leads dissemination and plays a key role in the research activities, particularly in assessing the spatial impacts of Urban Air Mobility (UAM).
The ITS Congress is one of the world’s leading events for Intelligent Transport Systems, attracting over 3,000 participants from 71 countries. With this year’s theme focused on “Clean, Resilient, and Connected Mobility,” the recognition of our work highlights the growing importance of preparing cities for future air mobility challenges.
The paper was presented by Kyriaki Daskaloudi during a technical session on sustainable mobility and moderated by Eetu Pilli-Sihvola from VTT.
It builds on the SUAMI framework (Palaiologk & Arvanitidis, 2025), introduced earlier this year at the Towards Sustainable Aviation Summit in Toulouse, and introduces new non-core indicators addressing environmental, operational, societal, and infrastructure aspects of UAM integration.
Commenting on the award, ERTICO – ITS Europe CEO Joost Vantomme stated:
“The paper describes how a city can prepare for managing potentially disruptive mobility services, and they use what for most cities will be new technologies and regulatory frameworks. So the approach is transferable to other locations—it’s an interoperable paper.”
Our lead author, Anna Palaiologk, added:
“New forms of Urban Air Mobility hold great promise for cities to address challenges such as congestion, emissions and noise. However, for this potential to be realised, stakeholders and policymakers need tools to properly assess likely future impacts from UAM technologies. Our research contributes to the development of these tools which can be applied in a wide variety of contexts.”
We are honoured that this research – developed within an interdisciplinary team and grounded in both technical and policy expertise – was recognised among such high-calibre contributions.
Future Needs thanks the ITS Congress organisers, the ImAFUSA consortium, and all the partners and peers who support and inspire our work. We remain committed to advancing forward-looking tools and frameworks that help cities adapt to the mobility systems of tomorrow.
