Piloting emerging Smart IoT Platforms and decentralized intelligence (IA) -

Expected Outcome

Projects are expected to contribute to the following outcomes:

• Implementations of edge paradigms in real environments leading to matured and customised IoT and next generation edge computing technologies for adoption in key applications and sectors.
• Paving the way to strategic industrial cooperation in data processing required to support future hyper-distributed applications by building open platforms, agreement on common architectures and standards, critical to establishing a mature European supply chain.
• Open platforms underpinning an emerging open edge ecosystem including midcaps, SMEs and start-ups that foster edge solutions, which represent a modular functional spectrum of executable apps and services critical to establishing a mature European supply chain under challenging and extremely competitive market conditions.
• Demonstrating cross-domain standardisation and up-scaling of edge infrastructure solutions

Scope

Proposals should target up-take and up-scaling of emerging EU-driven smart industrial internet of things and edge computing systems to perform under real life conditions, as to mature particular technologies like meta-operating systems for the IoT and the Edge, cognitive cloud technologies and tools for decentralized intelligence and swarm computing for adoption across key applications and sectors crucial for Europe’s competitiveness and open strategic autonomy.

Such systems must be targeted in order to create value in orchestrating multi-tiered data processing with control and automation on the edge, minimizing energy footprint, stimulating multi-sided marketplaces, and fostering open standards for virtualization, interoperability and secure and trusted data sharing between different stakeholders of the value chain – both horizontally and vertically, thereby providing an environment of multi-platform capabilities and preventing lock-in effects for users. Pilots are to implement and demonstrate mature solutions, on technology integration such as sensors, actuators, distributed control, connectivity and edge computing and embedded reasoning to demonstrate security, resilience and autonomy of system with low data processing latency for analytics and AI-inference and decentralised intelligence at the edge. In order to avoid concurrent solutions and fragmented standards and tools, pilots should validate cross-domain interfaces and common standards and foster cross-sector industrial agreements on architectures, design tools and governance. With the cross-domain up-take these pilots will demonstrate shorter development circles, accelerate adoption of edge infrastructure through shared cross-domain usage, especially through the creation of common management tools and standardised edge architectures

The objective is the development of systems to become open platforms underpinning an emerging open edge ecosystem including midcaps, SMEs and start-ups that foster edge solutions, which represent a modular functional spectrum of executable apps and services critical to establishing a mature European supply chain under challenging and extremely competitive market conditions

Innovation Actions are used to customise, explore the limits, test, optimise and validate emerging European smart IoT and edge computing systems under the constraints of industrial mass-market applications, by taking a system-level approach from hardware of smart devices to operating systems at device and at system level, to middleware and to application software. Pilots are expected to address cross-sector platforms in more than one application domain, which are strategic for European competitiveness such as renewable energy, buildings and electro-mobility, farming and/or industrial automation, including strategic aspects such as condition-monitoring/predictive maintenance and logistics, or other relevant application domains.

Pilot projects will contribute to the coherence/cluster work that will be implemented by the CSA called under WP2024-DATA-01-05, supporting the activities defined under ""Horizontal Activities"" below. This requires that they contribute to clustering their results of horizontal nature (interoperability approach, standards, security and governance approaches, validation of emerging business models for an emerging IoT/edge infrastructure and sustainability, methodologies, metrics, etc.). Links to RRF investments towards the next wave of modernization of European infrastructure should be explored.

Multidisciplinary research activities should address all the following aspects:

• Proposals submitted under this topic should include a business case and exploitation strategy.
• Research should build on existing standards or contribute to standardisation. Interoperability for data sharing should be addressed.
• Projects should build on or seek collaboration with existing projects and develop synergies with other relevant European, national or regional initiatives, funding programmes and platforms such as KDT JU, GAIA-X, et al.

In this topic the integration of the gender dimension (sex and gender analysis) in research and innovation content is not a mandatory requirement

Activities are expected to start at TRL 3-4 and achieve TRL 6-7 by the end of the project – see General Annex B.

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