We are proud to announce a major milestone for TRAFIKKLAB and the Road Traffic Division at NORD University: the HARMO project has been selected for funding under the European Union’s Horizon Europe programme. This is the first Horizon Europe Research and Innovation Action (RIA) involving our division and represents an important recognition of the research being carried out in Stjørdal.
The project, HARMO – Human-Aware Road Mobility Optimisation, will run for 36 months and brings together a strong international consortium of 13 partners from across Europe, including research institutions, industry leaders, transport organizations, and technology developers. The project has an overall budget of approximately €5 million, with around €282,000 allocated to NORD University.
Putting humans back into automated driving
Automated vehicles are becoming increasingly capable, but one challenge remains particularly difficult: understanding and anticipating human behaviour.
Many current automated driving systems assume that human drivers behave consistently and remain fully attentive. In reality, drivers often adapt their behaviour based on familiarity with roads, routines, and previous experiences. HARMO aims to bridge this gap by developing advanced behavioural models that capture how familiarity influences attention, risk perception, and decision-making behind the wheel.
The project will combine expertise from traffic psychology, behavioural science, artificial intelligence, simulation, and automated mobility to create automated driving systems that behave in a way that is not only safe, but also more predictable and understandable for human road users.
TRAFIKKLAB’s role
Researchers from TRAFIKKLAB will contribute their expertise in driver behaviour, human factors, road safety, and simulation-based research.
Among other activities, the team will:
- Lead a task within the work package dedicated to behavioural modelling.
- Develop probabilistic models of human driving behaviour.
- Design and analyse simulator-based and empirical studies.
- Support the validation of human-aware AI systems for automated vehicles.
- Contribute to education, dissemination, and future knowledge transfer.
The NORD team will include Giuseppe Marinelli, Abrar Hazoor, and An-Magritt Steinset Kummeneje, combining expertise in transportation, simulation, driver behaviour, and psychology.
A European collaboration
The consortium is coordinated by ITS Norway and includes partners from Norway, Spain, Germany, Belgium, Switzerland, France, and the United Kingdom. Together, the consortium will develop, test, and validate new approaches for connected and automated mobility, with the ultimate goal of improving safety and public trust in future transport systems.
HARMO will also contribute to the development of regulatory frameworks, validation methodologies, and real-world demonstrations, helping Europe move towards safer and more socially compatible automated transport solutions.
A milestone worth celebrating
Receiving Horizon Europe funding is highly competitive. For a relatively small research group such as TRAFIKKLAB, being selected as a partner in a European flagship research project is both a significant achievement and a strong validation of the work carried out by our researchers over the past years.
While we are naturally excited by this success, we are even more inspired by what comes next: new collaborations, new knowledge, new students, and new opportunities to contribute to safer mobility in Europe.
Today we celebrate. Tomorrow, the work begins.
The future of mobility should not only be automated. It should be human-aware. HARMO is our contribution to making that happen.