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The European project MAAT (Multi-body Advanced Airship for Transport) is producing the design of a transportation system for transport of people and goods, based on the cruiser feeder concept. This project defined novel airship concepts capable of handling safer than in the past hydrogen as a buoyant gas. In particular, it has explored novel variable shape airship concepts, which presents also intrinsic energetic advantages. It has recently conduced to the definition of an innovative design method based on the constructal principle, which applies to large transport vehicles and allows performing an effective energetic optimization and an effective optimization for the specific mission.

In the general framework of the EU FP7 MAAT project, a novel green air transport architecture is under development. The paper presents the possible architectures for the cabin connections and the transfer modalities for people, crew and freight, for to the European project MAAT. Different architectures have been evaluated setting out to cover the structural and propulsive needs and to enable the transport modes between the Cruiser and the Feeders. The different possibilities are discussed conceptually, by considering the advantages and disadvantages of the presented configurations. The bases for future detailed design and research are established, as through such conceptual study the main parameters are identified and found to affect the general design of both airships and their operability. The aim of this paper is to specify the necessary elements, which are necessary to perform the docking operation by taking into account the prescribed Feeder-Cruiser geometries.

The permanently increasing number of convenience and safety functions leads to higher complexity of in-car electronics and the rapidly growing amount of sensors, actuators and electronic control units places higher demands on high- speed data communication protocols. Safety-critical systems need deterministic protocols with fault-tolerant behavior. The need for on-board diagnosis calls for flexible use of bandwidth and an ever-increasing number of functions necessitates a flexible means of extending the system. None of the communication solutions available on the market until now (like CAN or TTP) have been able to fulfill all these demands. To solve these problems, BMW together with several semiconductor companies has developed a new protocol for safety-critical applications in automotive vehicles.