A Horizon Europe research project called PROSAFE‑TWIN will develop artificial‑intelligence systems that aim to warn road operators about emerging hazards before they become crashes, the project’s coordinators and EU databases say.
Project, partners and pilots
PROSAFE‑TWIN is funded under Horizon Europe and has been awarded almost €5 million to run a 42‑month research and innovation action that began in October 2026 and is scheduled to run until March 2030.
The project brings together 17 organisations from nine European countries and the United States; the consortium held a kick‑off meeting in Bilbao on 20–21 October 2026.
PROSAFE‑TWIN will run pilot demonstrations in four environments: Bizkaia (Spain), Rotterdam (the Netherlands), a motorway section in Vila Real (Portugal) and a regional mobility corridor in Slovenia. The pilots are designed to test the system across rural, interurban, motorway and dense urban streets.
How the system works
The consortium will build hybrid digital twins — virtual replicas of real road networks that fuse physics‑based traffic models with machine learning trained on data from roadside sensors, connected vehicles, weather feeds and other sources. The aim is a live risk map that predicts where queues, hidden conflicts with vulnerable road users or other safety‑critical situations are likely to form next, and to provide confidence scores with each prediction.
Project partners say the tool is explicitly designed to support human operators rather than replace them: social‑science work packages will study how warnings are presented in control rooms to avoid alert fatigue and to preserve human oversight.
“PROSAFE‑TWIN is about moving road safety from reaction to prevention, giving road authorities the intelligence to identify risks and intervene before critical situations become crashes,” said Sofía López de Aguileta of the Mobility and Logistics Cluster of Euskadi, which coordinates the project.
What this means for the market
For vehicle manufacturers, suppliers and fleet operators across Europe — including in Central and Eastern Europe — PROSAFE‑TWIN demonstrates growing public investment in AI systems that sit at the intersection of infrastructure, connected vehicles and traffic management. By focusing on hybrid digital twins and real‑time predictions, the project targets use cases that can feed fleet‑management platforms, ADAS validation workflows and roadside‑equipment suppliers with richer, predictive data. This could accelerate demand for sensor arrays, V2X integration and software that translates predictive warnings into operator actions; those are areas where European suppliers and integrators already compete.
The project also signals how EU research funding is aligning technical work with regulation: PROSAFE‑TWIN plans to align results with European intelligent transport system standards and the EU AI Act, an important step for any technology intended for deployment by road authorities or as part of vehicle‑to‑infrastructure ecosystems. That alignment should ease later procurement and certification hurdles for vendors that participate in the pilots.
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Sources: CORDIS, LMT
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