Europe’s transition to a circular and climate-neutral economy is as much an environmental, economic and social necessity as it is an opportunity for European businesses and citizens. To meet the targets and ambition set out by EU Circular Economy policies and actualise circular value chains as a competitive advantage, DigiCirc will empower SMEs to leverage digital technology as a key enabler for innovative circular products/ services, processes and business models. To this end, DigiCirc will create and coordinate the DigiCirc innovation network, facilitated by an engagement campaign of 3 partner clusters, to bring together a wide-spectrum of ‘triple-helix’ stakeholders (local/ regional authorities, big industry actors, SMEs, RTOs, civil society, etc.). 3 strategic high-growth domains will be in scope (Circular Cities, Bioeconomy, Blue Economy), each represented by a leading cluster in the field. The Ecosystem will lay the foundation for a holistic, dynamic and cross-border/sector open space for innovation, implement through the DigiCirc accelerators (3 calls, one in each target domain). The accelerators will be run by innovation support experts to transform validated concepts into robust business models towards a commercial launch. This will involve (i) tailored business support: courses and coaching; (ii) identifying and establishing strategic partnerships (facilitated by a dedicated Matchmaking Tool) to create complementary consortia (thematic & SMEs with a LSD enabler partner, e.g. industry, local government); (iii) two circular data platforms to simplify data use and integration across complex value chains and environments thus boosting circular business plans and concepts. Finally, A DigiCirc Roadmap will be drafted to define the path for digital-enabled circular innovation in the 3 domains, the way-forward for each of the clusters to seize upon knowledge gained and identify/define concrete sustainability options for the DigiCirc innovation network.

CHARIOT will provide a design method and cognitive computing platform supporting a unified approach towards Privacy, Security and Safety (PSS) of IoT Systems including the following innovations: • A Privacy and security protection method building on state of the art Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) technologies to enable the coupling of a pre-programmed private key deployed to IoT devices with a corresponding private key on Blockchain system. • A Blockchain ledger in which categories of IoT physical, operational and functional changes are both recorded and affirmed/approved by a combination of a cognitive engine and private key hashing between the cognitive engine and IoT devices to authorise change and, likewise, invalidating any and all other changes be they malicious or otherwise. • A fog-based decentralised infrastructure for Firmware Security integrity checking that leverages a Blockchain ledger to enhance physical, operational and functional security of IoT systems, including actuation and deactivation. • An accompanying IoT Safety Supervision Engine providing a novel solution to the challenges of securing IoT data, devices and functionality in new and existing industry-specific safety critical systems. • A Cognitive System and Method with accompanying supervision, analytics and prediction models enabling high security and integrity of Industrials IoT. • New methods and tools for static code analysis of IoT devices, resulting in more efficient secure and safer IoT software development and V&V. Three Living Labs will demonstrate realistic and compelling heterogeneous solutions through industry reference implementations at representative scale, with the underlying goal of demonstrating that Secure, Privacy Mediated and Safety IoT imperatives are collectively met, in turn delivering a key stepping stone to the EU’s roadmap for the next generation IoT platforms and services.

The need for levels of availability and scalability beyond those supported by relational databases has led to the emergence of a new generation of purpose-specific databases grouped under the term NoSQL. In general, NoSQL databases are designed with horizontal scalability as a primary concern and deliver increased availability and fault-tolerance at a cost of temporary inconsistency and reduced durability of data. To balance the requirements for data consistency and availability, organisations increasingly migrate towards hybrid data persistence architectures comprising both relational and NoSQL databases. The consensus is that this trend will only become stronger in the future; critical data will continue to be stored in ACID (predominately relational) databases while non-critical data will be progressively migrated to high-availability NoSQL databases. Moreover, as the volume and the value of natural language content constantly grows, built-in support for sophisticated text processing in data persistence architectures is increasingly becoming essential. The aim of TYPHON is to provide a methodology and an integrated technical offering for designing, developing, querying and evolving scalable architectures for persistence, analytics and monitoring of large volumes of hybrid (relational, graph-based, document-based, natural language etc.) data. TYPHON brings together research partners with a long track record of conducting internationally-leading research on software modelling, domain-specific languages, text mining and data migration, and of delivering research results in the form of robust and widely-used open-source software, industrial partners active in the automotive, earth observation, banking, and motorway operation domains, an industrial advisory board of world-class experts in the fields of databases, business intelligence and analytics, and large-scale data management, and a global consortium including more than 400 organisations from all sectors of IT.

ICONET will significantly extend state of the art research and development around the PI concept in pursuit of a new networked architecture for interconnected logistics hubs that combine with IoT capabilities and aiming towards commercial exploitation of results. ICONET strives to achieve the end commercial goal of allowing shipments to be routed towards final destinations automatically, by using collaborative decisions inspired by the information centric networking paradigm, and optimizing efficiency and customer service levels across the whole network. According to this vision, cargo regarded as smart physical packets will flow between hubs based on ‘content’ of the cargo influencing key commercial imperatives such as cost, optimisation, routing, efficiency and advancing EU's Green agenda. Consequently, the consortium are discernibly aimed at three (3) avenues of commercialisation and exploitation from the ICONET innovation, specifically targeted in the areas of (a) Warehousing as a service, (b) E-commerce fulfillment as a service, and (c) Synchromodality as a service. PI based logistic configurations will be simulated, prototyped and validated in the project . Modelling and analysis techniques will be combined with serious game type simulation, physical and digital prototyping, using living lab (LL) requirements scenarios and data. With analyses and simulations, optimal topologies and distribution policies for PI will be determined. The project implementation will be based on a succession of phases of modelling and design/prototyping, learning and experimentation and feedback and interaction with the wider business community, including the ALICE logistics platform as well as members of the partner Associations ESC, UIRR and ELUPEG. Through its Living Labs, the project will address under the PI paradigm both Supply Network Collaboration and Supply Network Coordination.