Current European refineries and civil infrastructures, like tunnels and bridges, are ageing, and therefore gradually become deteriorated, especially taking into consideration the current and future economic situation in Europe where large investments in renewing infrastructures are not foreseen. Then, it is paramount important to increase the efficiency and quality of inspection and maintenance activities in order to keep the necessary safety levels in these ageing infrastructures. To overcome this important challenge, PILOTING proposes the adaptation, integration, and demonstration of robotic solutions, in an integrated platform, which will be tested and evaluated in three large-scale pilots: refineries (Oil&Gas sector), bridges/viaducts and tunnels (Civil/Transport Infrastructure sector) with the involvement of all the actors that conform the full value chain. The developed platform will: demonstrate the application of robotics at scale in the domain of Inspection and Maintenance (I&M), reduce end-user commercial risks on the deployment of robotics in the sector, demonstrate capabilities and improve understanding of robotics uptake value, develop and support the related ecosystem around the piloting I&M operations, as well as, contribute to industrial standards in robotics for I&M. To achieve the above, PILOTING will develop an advanced robotic-based platform that will be deployed in the three industrial scenarios and demonstrate the real value towards the inspection and maintenance community as well as its high level socio-economic impact when applied at scale. PILOTING will establish large-scale pilots in real industrial environments to directly reply to main I&M challenges through the demonstration of: increasing rate of inspection and maintenance tasks, improving coverage and performance, decreasing costs and time of operations, improving inspection quality and increasing safety of operators.

Wireless networks in buildings suffer from congestion, interference, security and safety concerns, restricted propagation and poor in-door location accuracy. The Internet of Radio-Light (IoRL) project develops a safer, more secure, customizable and intelligent building network that reliably delivers increased throughput (greater than 10Gbps) from access points pervasively located within buildings, whilst minimizing interference and harmful EM exposure and providing location accuracy of less than 10 cm. It thereby shows how to solve the problem of broadband wireless access in buildings and promotes the establishment of a global standard in ITU. Building landlords will be incentivized to find funding to realize this solution for their properties to increase their value resulting in a stimulated market for broadband networking products in buildings, benefiting society and stimulating the world Gross Domestic Product. IoRL project provides solutions to the two main barriers to develop this broadband networking solution in buildings because it: (i) Brings together a multi-disciplinary team of research institutions and industries in a collaborative project to develop and demonstrate this vision, who otherwise would not have assembled to achieve this goal; (ii) Develops a proof of concept demonstrator, which will act as the basis for standardization of a global solution. The starting point is the joint VLC demonstrator at Tsinghua University & ISEP, the mmWave at Cobham Wireless and the NFV/SDN at NCSR-Democratos. The challenges are to (i) Develop broadband communication solutions for buildings by integrating these technologies to exploit the pervasiveness and accessibility of the existing electric light access points, the broadband capacities of mmWave and VLC technologies and the flexibility of SDN/NFV; (ii) Industrially design a radio-light solution that can be integrated into the myriad of form factors of existing electric light systems and consumer products.

MOBILITIES FOR EU aims at demonstrating that innovative passenger mobility and freight transport concepts designed and implemented following participative and user-center principles are cost-effective and feasible solutions to contribute significantly to the cities’ transformation towards climate-neutrality, allowing to speed up the process even to reach SCOPE 2 emissions reduction in 2030. Madrid (Spain) and Dresden (Germany) will implement 11 pilots comprising 27 very innovative solutions for mobility of people and freight, exploiting the combined potential of electrification, automation and connectivity, from the design to the implementation and evaluation stages acting as Lead Cities (LC). Both cities also ambition to act as pioneers of this process, taking advantage of multiple already existing initiates of social engagement and empowerment that will be integrated in the idea of Urban Transport Labs (UT-Labs), conceived as Innovation Hubs with the aim of fostering faster upscaling and replicability at EU level, making 5 Replication Cities (Ioaninna–Greece, Trencin–Slovakia, Espoo-Finland, Gdansk-Poland and Sarajevo-Bosnia&Herzegovina) through their own UT-Labs direct participants of the processes and later on main protagonists of their own designs.

Major disasters (e.g., Ponte Morandi, 2018) highlighted the critical condition of many European civil infrastructures due to inadequate maintenance, unforeseen operating conditions, and extended usage. Regular inspections of all types of infrastructures are essential to assess their health, guide maintenance and repair, and extend service life. SARAH adopts a human-centred approach to develop a safe-by-design integrated digital solution that supports maintenance and repair decision and planning, order, intervention and reporting. Leveraging metaverse technologies and egocentric augmented reality solutions, the system empowers infrastructure supervisors and intervention workers by providing real-time assistance, fostering skill development, and improving their Occupational Safety and Health. The solution, rooted in Human Factors: a/ identifies issues in civil infrastructures in a rapid, cost-effective and safe manner thanks to innovative sensors deployed on-site (corrosion, soil nail and anchor, structural crack) possibly via an unmanned aerial system (load up to 1kg); b/ fastly and accurately assesses the needs for repair (98 % of issues properly ranked) using a Digital Twin of the infrastructure able to run in real-time (reduced order, automatic continuous calibration) and proposes prioritised timely interventions, considering risk assessment using a Decision Support Engine (80% ad hoc correct advice for inspections); c/ launches extra inspections (either with autonomous aerial system or human), and provides remote support to the intervention workers (80% satisfaction, evaluated via interviews); d/ delivers certification report generated using generative AI, after intervention and repair (at least 2 types of reports generated). With this approach, SARAH offers a game changer for infrastructure inspection, maintenance and repair.

According to European TEN-T guidelines, due consideration must be given to the risk assessments and adaptation measures during infrastructure planning, in order to improve resilience to disasters. SAFEWAY’s aim is to design, validate and implement holistic methods, strategies, tools and technical interventions to significantly increase the resilience of inland transport infrastructure. SAFEWAY leads to significantly improved resilience of transport infrastructures, developing a holistic toolset with transversal application to anticipate and mitigate the effects extreme events at all modes of disaster cycle: 1) “Preparation”: substantial improvement of risk prediction, monitoring and decision tools contributing to anticipate, prevent and prepare critical assets for the damage impacts; 2)“Response and Recovery”: the incorporation of SAFEWAY IT solutions into emergency plans, and real-time optimal communication with operators and end users (via crowdsourcing and social media); 3)“Mitigation”: improving precision in the adoption of mitigation actions (by impact analysis of different scenarios) together with new construction systems and materials, contributing to the resistance & absorption of the damage impact. SAFEWAY consortium has 15 partners that cover multidisciplinary and multisectorial business fields associated with resilience of transport infrastructure in Europe: national transport infrastructure managers & operators, a main global infrastructure operator, partners able to provide various data sources with large coverage in real time, comprehensive ITC solutions, and leading experts in resilience, risk databases, remote sensing-based inspection, and decision systems based on predictive modelling. SAFEWAY will carry-out 4 real case studies distributed through 4 countries, linked to 5 corridors of the TEN-T Core Network. SAFEWAY has as main expected impacts: 1) at least 20% improvement in mobility and 2) at least 20% lower cost of infrastructure maintenance.