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.