Within a context of growing urban population, advances in urban logistics operations and improved local authority planning, especially in the field of the urban freight transport, can alleviate the associated negative environmental and economic impacts occurring in cities. Several types of stakeholders are involved in such urban logistics management processes. Among them, freight carriers and shippers are interested in minimizing freight logistics costs in order to maximize their profits, while maintaining a competitive level of service to their customers. City administrators and residents are oriented towards a decrease in traffic congestion, social costs and environmental nuisances, even though they are often direct beneficiaries of high quality delivery services. This leads to a multitude of differing and possibly conflicting objectives that are involved in urban freight transport planning and decision making, yielding a high level of complexity. This provides a main motivation for the development of tools for helping decision makers to reach higher grades of efficiency. Despite growing academic interest, the extent to which freight transport is acknowledged and formally considered in local authority transport planning varies considerably from country to country, and on a more local level, between towns and cities. As a result, policy development with respect to urban freight and city logistics is characterised by a rather fragmented approach, with many city authorities finding it difficult to address the complex set of differing views of a large variety of stakeholders. The proposed project will be aimed at identifying local authority planning needs with regards to urban/city logistics activities and the necessary pre-requisites for inclusion of stakeholders in the process. Finally, the project will promote the knowledge transfer of methods and models through the conceptual development of a novel decision support tool (thanks to involved software houses).

The large scale integration of renewable energy sources (RES) has introduced a new operating paradigm. Renewable energy sources are characterized by uncertainty and volatility. Moreover, overloading of transmission and distribution feeders have become more frequent. The curtailment of renewable power generation has thus increased, contradicting the goals for high shares of RES. A valuable solution to these challenges is the introduction of flexibility from flexible resources and loads. In this context, FlexCHESS project proposes cutting-edge solutions based on digital twin concept, Virtual energy storage systems (VESS) and Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) to revolutionize the existing practices. Based on the aggregation of Connected Hybrid Energy Storage System (CHESS), FlexCHESS improves the grid stability while increasing the profitability of its installations by guaranteeing various ancillary services at the distribution and transmission network levels. FlexCHESS will also ensure the highest level of interoperability of the proposed solutions and enhance the innovation capacity and competitiveness of SMEs and Startups in Europe by unlocking access to meaningful information and co-creating new business opportunities. This will be achieved by the appropriate promoting of open innovation and making smart technologies an asset for intelligent business. In order to validate and evaluate the proposed solutions, five pilot sites demonstrations with diverse assets in different European countries are planned. The aggregation and optimization of different resources will be extended to take into account not only electrical energy storage systems (ESS), but also multi-ESSs. Thus, FlexCHESS project will define different scenarios allowing to evaluate the performances and flexibility capability of CHESS. FlexCHESS project Consortium gathers 3 universities, 2 large companies, 3DSOs, 4 SMEs, and 2 NGO.

ResilMesh will develop a cyber situational awareness based Security Orchestration and Analytics Platform Architecture (SOAPA) toolset to improve digital infrastructure resilience through fulfilling these objectives: 1: Improving end-to-end data aggregation and security control interoperability in dispersed digital infrastructures 2: Giving CSIRTs better awareness of the service and asset dependencies of their network 3: Helping CSIRTs to build cyber resilience capacity 4:Developing AI based algorithms and tools for early and ongoing attack detection and prediction 5:Developing a situation assessment system to view and forecast network level risk These objectives are achieved through a 10 work package project plan. ResilMesh will build a SOAPA platform by combining existing security controls and other tools from consortium participant with readily available open source elements. It will develop algorithms and software tools in the project and will integrate these with the platform to form a complete SOAPA system. It will validate the operation of the ResilMesh system through use cases in three different infrastructure categories (i.e. renewable energy SCADA; smart manufacturing robotics and regional civil infrastructure) and five open call use cases. These 8 pilots will ensure that the platform is evaluated across a wide range of critical infrastructures. ReilMesh develops AI based algorithms to improve attack detection and prediction for endpoint and network traffic; it help CSIRTs deal digital infrastructure complexity and heterogeneity by providing tools to give them better awareness of environment dependencies, threats and risk while preserving privacy. It increases the reliability and granularity of shared threat intelligence to improve context for threat hunting and cyber forensics incident response leading to more robust decision making. Finally it provides a suite of best practices to build cyber capacity to improve resilience preparation.

The main objective of the INCLUSION project is to understand, assess and evaluate the accessibility and inclusiveness of transport solutions in European prioritised areas, identify gaps and unmet needs, propose and experiment with a range of innovative and transferable solutions, including ICT-enabled elements, ensuring accessible, inclusive and equitable conditions for all and especially vulnerable user categories. INCLUSION will address a large set of case studies (at least 50) involving different forms of geographical areas and transport contexts, demographic categories, population groups and mobility solutions, providing concrete experiences from various European sites and pilot initiatives involving a variety of regulatory and business frameworks, supporting technologies, organisational and operational conditions. Complementary to this, a number of innovative solutions will be concretely tried out and validated through real-life experiments (Innovation Pilot Labs) in a mix of urban, peri-/sub-urban and rural target areas in Belgium, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Spain and the UK, offering a variety of different transport environments, socio-economic contexts, cultural and geographical conditions. Expected results include: an understanding of the main challenges affecting transport provision and accessibility in the different type of prioritised areas; a structured view highlighting the dependencies among spatial and environmental characteristics, populations segments and their mobility needs; in-depth examination of 10 innovative PT approaches and a wider catalogue of at least 40 promising cases contributing to more accessible, inclusive and equitable transport solutions, complemented by innovative solution components validated in real-life experiments; a set of recommendations and an “option generator” for the development and deployment of mobility solutions addressing the needs of vulnerable user communities in European prioritised areas

The FAIR principles provide a framework for enabling proper access and reusability of scientific data, and implementing them is a key goal of the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC). However, providing access to sensitive or confidential data while preserving privacy/confidentiality and usability for researchers is still an open question. Existing solutions like safe rooms, safe pods, or data safe havens are often challenging for the development of reproducible research and seem counter-intuitive when dealing with open science and FAIR principles. The SIESTA project aims to provide a set of tools, services, and methodologies for the effective sharing of sensitive data in the EOSC, following a cloud-based model and approach. SIESTA will provide user-friendly tools with the aim of fostering the uptake of sensitive data sharing and processing in the EOSC. The project will deliver trusted cloud-based environments for the management and sharing of sensitive data that are built in a reproducible way, together with a set of services and tools to ease the secure sharing of sensitive data in the EOSC through state-of-the-art anonymization techniques. The overall objective is to enhance the EOSC Exchange services by delivering a set of cloud-based trusted environments for the analysis of sensitive data in the EOSC demonstrating the feasibility of the FAIR principles over them.