Phoenix aims to develop a fundamentally novel computational model for reconstructing complex software systems, following some massive internal failure or external infrastructure damage. Recovering system operations is a challenging problem as it may require excessive system reconstruction using a different infrastructure (i.e., computational and communication devices named system cells) from the one that the system was originally designed for. Thus, software functionality may have to be remodularised and allocated onto devices with very different characteristics than the ones originally used but with some generic capabilities. Phoenix aims to develop a bio-inspired paradigm for reconstructing nearly extinct complex software systems based on a novel computational DNA (co-DNA) oriented systems modelling approach. The co-DNA will encapsulate logic and program code and will enable the use of analogues of biological processes for transmitting, transforming, combining, activating and deactivating it across computational and communication devices. The purpose of encoding the co-DNA of a system, and computational analogues of biological processes using it, is to enable other computational devices receiving the co-DNA to act as parts of the system that needs to be reconstructed, realise chunks of its functionality, and spread further the system reconstruction process. The Phoenix approach will bring a breakthrough in the current software system design and engineering paradigm. This will be through, not only a fundamentally new way of engineering mechanisms to support the resilience, continuity and recovery of software systems, but also the initiation of a new paradigm of designing and implementing software systems, based on the encoding of a system co-DNA that can trigger processes of self-regulated and incrementally expanding system functionality.

IDEAL-CITIES aims to develop, demonstrate and evaluate an open modular platform for building adaptive Internet-of-Things and Participatory Sensing (IoTPS) based Smart City applications, supported by Big Data analytics and Cloud services. IDEAL-CITIES outcomes will increase urban life quality, safety and inclusivity by enabling citizens and authorities to produce and exchange contextualised distributed intelligence and information in real-time, in a trustworthy and sustainable manner. The IDEAL-CITIES platform will foster the development and uptake of novel IoTPS-based Smart City applications and enhance the associated market base, by demonstrating new feasible ways for providing IoTPS applications and services which can contribute to urban citizen’s well-being and the cities’ circular economy. The IDEAL-CITIES platform will be demonstrated in the context of two fully-fledged IoTPS Applications, with a focus on mobility for the impaired and on citizen safety, in close cooperation with involved communities (a non-profit organisation for the blind and partially-sighted and four municipalities, respectively), validating the utility of the proposed platform and approach.

SEMIoTICS aims to develop a pattern-driven framework, built upon existing IoT platforms, to enable and guarantee secure and dependable actuation and semi-autonomic behaviour in IoT/IIoT applications. Patterns will encode proven dependencies between security, privacy, dependability and interoperability (SPDI) properties of individual smart objects and corresponding properties of orchestrations involving them. The SEMIoTICS framework will support cross-layer intelligent dynamic adaptation, including heterogeneous smart objects, networks and clouds, addressing effective adaptation and autonomic behaviour at field (edge) and infrastructure (backend) layers based on intelligent analysis and learning. To address the complexity and scalability needs within horizontal and vertical domains, SEMIoTICS will develop and integrate smart programmable networking and semantic interoperability mechanisms. The practicality of the above approach will be validated using three diverse usage scenarios in the areas of renewable energy (addressing IIoT), healthcare (focusing on human-centric IoT), and smart sensing (covering both IIoT and IoT); and will be offered through an open API. SEMIoTICS consortium consists of strong European industry (Siemens, Engineering, STMicroelectronics), innovative SMEs (Sphynx, Iquadrat, BlueSoft) and academic partners (FORTH, Uni Passau, CTTC) covering the whole value chain of IoT, local embedded analytics and their programmable connectivity to the cloud IoT platforms with associated security and privacy. The consortium is striving for a common vision of creating EU’s technological capability of innovative IoT landscape both at European and international level.

SmartShip aims to bring together Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) of focused Universities, Research Institutions and Companies oriented into the maritime sector in order to build a holistic integrated ICT-based framework for the sustainable, individualized and completely automated energy management of ships. To accomplish this, it will take advantage of all the know-how that the consortium brings to the project referring to ICT technologies such as Data Analytics, IoT exploitation, DSS use, visualization tools, optimization algorithms and tools and Circular Economy approach methods. Smartship aims to offer a multi-layer optimization in the fields of fuel consumption, energy efficiency and emissions control management, in full respect to the implementation of the requirements of maritime sector regulations and taking into account applications of circular economy concepts in the maritime as well. Knowledge exchange between the partners that are already involved in the maritime sector, the ICT technology industry partners and the academia partners is one of the major Smartship’s objectives and will be materialised through corresponding secondments during the whole project’s timeplan. These synergies aim to build stronger collaboration relationships between the partners with respect to their future exploitation beyond Smartship project. Summing up Smartship will capitalise on available COTS technologies and will deliver an ICT & IoT-enabled holistic cloud-based maritime performance & monitoring system, for the entire lifecycle of a ship, aimed to optimise energy efficiency, emissions reduction and fuel consumption, whist introducing circular economy concepts in the maritime field.

There is an increasing number of signs that the edge computing concept is going to play a dominant role in the forthcoming technology developments, disrupting economies at a large scale. The big cloud providers promptly jumped in to get the lion’s share but edge computing is intrinsically more “democratic” than cloud computing. In fact, its distributed and localized nature can be an antibody for big trusts, if properly exploited. Synergistically employing edge computing with upcoming technologies such as 5G provides an opportunity for EU to capitalize on its local resource and infrastructure and its SME-dominated application development landscape and achieve an edge-computing-driven disruption with a local business scope. To this end, ACCORDION establishes an opportunistic approach in bringing together edge resource/infrastructures (public clouds, on-premise infrastructures, telco resources, even end-devices) in pools defined in terms of latency, that can support NextGen application requirements. To mitigate the expectation that these pools will be “sparse”, providing low availability guarantees, ACCORDION will intelligently orchestrate the compute & network continuum formed between edge and public clouds, using the latter as a capacitor. Deployment decisions will be taken also based on privacy, security, cost, time and resource type criteria. The slow adoption rate of novel technological concepts from the EU SMEs will be tackled though an application framework, that will leverage DevOps and SecOps to facilitate the transition to the ACCORDION system. With a strong emphasis on European edge computing efforts (MEC, OSM) and 3 highly anticipated NextGen applications on collaborative VR, multiplayer mobile- and cloud-gaming, brought by the involved end users, ACCORDION is expecting to radically impact the application development and deployment landscape, also directing part of the related revenue from non-EU vendors to EU-local infrastructure and application providers.