The main objective of SOCRATIC is to facilitate a platform so citizens and/or organisations can collaboratively identify specific innovative solutions for achieving the desired Global Sustainability Goals, as defined by the United Nations. The platform will allow individuals, collectives, institutions, companies or Administration to: (1) propose new challenges oriented to solve specific sustainability issues; (2) invite individuals or organizations to participate with innovative ideas that solve these issues; (3) collectively select and implement the most promising ideas. SOCRATIC will also implement a Global Observatory on Sustainability Challenges with a double objective: (1) Measuring the impact of SOCRATIC actions on Global Sustainability Challenges by monitoring social networks, (2) Using the data about Global Sustainability Challenges gathered in social media as a source of information to launch challenges in the SOCRATIC platform. The SOCRATIC project has a deep user-centric approach, implementing gamification techniques to engage users in the sustained use of the platform. The project involves one European NGO (CiberVoluntarios) and a group of Young Social Innovators from the “Experts in Team” program of the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU-EiT). Both collectives perform actions in different fields, but with a common tool, the use of IT to empower citizens and achieve specific sustainability goals. The pilots will be initially focused on three specific challenges: “Ensuring healthy lives and promote well-being for all at all ages (UN´s Goal 3)”, “Ensuring inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all (UN’s Goal 4)”, and “Promoting sustained, inclusive and sustainable economic growth, full and productive employment and decent work for all (UN’s Goal 8)”.

Critical infrastructures for, e.g. the transport of goods and people or the supply of energy and water, are the lifelines of our globalized society. Impairments can result in enduring supply bottlenecks, significant disruptions to public safety or other dramatic consequences. Currently used monitoring processes for these infrastructures are costly, difficult to implement in isolated areas, nonuniform due to heterogenous technical solutions and poorly scalable or automatable. The project Instantaneous Infrastructure Monitoring by Earth Observation (IIMEO) contributes to an end-to-end solution for the operational real-time, high-resolution monitoring of critical infrastructure by means of an innovative observation payload for a future LEO constellation. Our system concept focusses on data availability within less than 1 hour from user request to information delivery by AI-based processing approaches implemented on space-qualified on-board hardware. To provide a persistent weather-independent monitoring service with an improved spatial resolution of up to 50 cm, we propose a novel sensor configuration consisting of a 35-GHz-SAR sensor in combination with optical cameras. Based on existing technology from scientific institutions and European space industry, hard- and software will be further developed up to TRL 6. Development will be carried out in close cooperation with a railway company as a pilot user to define use cases for commercial applications based on the requirements of industry and public services. The end-to-end prototype service including on-board processing will be demonstrated within a final flight campaign. A roadmap will describe the further exploitation of the project results and outline further applications of the technology to other infrastructure systems. A follow-up demonstrator mission in 2026/27 is envisaged to showcase the monitoring of railways from space on a global scale on TRL 7.

In traditional models of manufacturing, the information flow from product design, over production processes, to the manufactured product has been strictly unidirectional. The production equipment “blindly” executes tasks that have no direct relationship to the concepts that are present in the original design models and the product is used with little or no feedback concerning product use patterns. In order to enhance the manufacturability of products and at the same time the flexibility of both factory production systems and modern products, both effective configurability and feedback to design and production is required to assure their highest efficiency. The SAFIRE project will provide technology and infrastructure to enable Reconfiguration as a Service for dynamic smart factory systems and manufactured smart products that take advantage of cloud-based services and computing power to continually optimise the performance of manufacturing systems and products with respect to key performance characteristics including throughput, power consumption, utilisation, maintenance and other factors. A key objective of the project is to develop cloud-based analytics and reconfiguration capabilities that extend the operating systems of smart factories with: 1) both reactive and predictive reconfiguration for production systems; 2) flexible run-time reconfiguration decisions during production rather than pre-planned at production planning time; 3) real-time reconfiguration decisions for optimisation of performance and real-time production functions. The advanced analytics and reconfiguration capabilities will be based on innovations in shared situational awareness and mastering the big data challenges associated with sensor, smart objects and process data from manufacturing, logistics and enterprise systems.