2030 and beyond, Europe and the world will face opportunities and challenges of growth and sustainability of tremendous magnitude; to pro-actively tackle issues of green deal efficiency, digital inclusion and assurance of health and safety in a post pandemic world will be key. A powerful vision is needed to connect physical, digital, and human worlds, firmly anchored in future wireless technology and architectural research. The Hexa-X vision calls for an x-enabler fabric of connected intelligence, networks of networks, sustainability, global service coverage, extreme experience, and trustworthiness. Wireless technologies are of critical relevance for our society and economy today; their importance for growth will continue to steadily increase with 5G and its evolution, enabling new ecosystems and services motivated by strongly growing traffic and trillions of devices. The Hexa-X project ambition includes to develop key technology enablers in the areas of (i) fundamentally new radio access technologies at high frequencies and high-resolution localization and sensing; (ii) connected intelligence though AI-driven air interface and governance for future networks, and (iii) 6G architectural enablers for network disaggregation and dynamic dependability. Europe has been a leader in wireless network technologies for decades. It is now critical to unleash our best brains in the joint research ambition of a “flagship” project to maintain the global industry leadership for the B5G/6G era. The Hexa-X flagship is a unique effort of vision, and an opportunity for disruptive impact in sustainable growth and technology experience in Europe and worldwide!

6G is envisioned to accelerate the path started in 5G for catering to the needs of a wide variety of vertical use cases, both current and emerging. This will require major enhancements of the current 5G capabilities especially in terms of bandwidth, latency, reliability, security, and energy. PREDICT-6G’s mission is therefore set towards the development of an end-to-end 6G (E2E) solution including architecture and protocols that can guarantee seamless provisioning of services for vertical use cases requiring extremely tight timing and reliability constraints. To succeed, the solution will target determinism network infrastructures at large, including wired and wireless segments and their interconnections. PREDICT-6G will develop a novel Multi-technology Multi-domain Data-Plane (MDP) overhauling the reliability and time sensitiveness design features existing in current wired and wireless standards. The ambition is for the MDP design to be inherently deterministic. To achieve this, PREDICT-6G will develop an AI-driven Multi-stakeholder Inter-domain Control-Plane (AICP) for the provisioning of deterministic network paths to support time sensitive services as requested by end-customers and with different scaling ambitions, e.g., from the network in a single vehicle to a large, geographically dispersed network. This requires timely monitoring and prediction of the behavior of the complete network, including identifying potential sources of quality violations and analyzing various routes of the traffic flows. These capabilities will be delivered through the PREDICT-6G AI-powered Digital Twin (DT) framework, allowing the prediction of the behavior of the end-to-end network infrastructure, and enabling anticipative control and validation of the network provisions to meet the real-world time-sensitive and reliability requirements of the running services.

SIFIS-Home aims at providing a secure-by-design and consistent software framework for improving resilience of Interconnected Smart Home Systems at all stack levels. To this end, the framework enables the development of security, privacy aware and accountable applications, algorithms and services, and makes it possible to detect and dynamically react to cyber-attacks and intrusion attempts or violation of user-defined policies, thus increasing control and trust of Smart Home end users. Smart Home is an emerging application paradigm which has been gaining increasing popularity. Most recently, the Internet of Things (IoT) has been fostering a vision of Smart Home systems, where users can install connectable (smart) devices and appliances that cooperate to automatically manage home services and functionalities. This emerging market is rapidly attracting software developers to produce novel applications and services, to provide additional Smart Home functionalities. However, noticeable barriers and concerns are still present, mainly related to cyber-security and safety within Smart Home systems, as well as to the privacy and integrity of produced and consumed data, most of which are personal and sensitive. Also, many Smart Home devices use custom and proprietary security solutions that do not account for interactions with other devices in the Smart Home system. Plus, developers have to develop applications adaptable to different systems and architectures, where security aspects are often neglected or poorly addressed. The consortium combines leading industry players in the IoT, telecommunication and cyber-security markets with research and academic institutions, also involved as key contributors to premier international standardisation bodies (e.g. IETF), and having leading roles in the SPARTA, CONCORDIA and CyberSec4Europe projects of the European Cyber Competence Network. SMEs active in the Smart Home and IoT markets and Open Source community complete the consortium.

With aging infrastructure in developing-and-developed countries, and with the gradual expansion of distributed installations, the costs of inspection and repair tasks have been growing vastly and incessantly. To address this reality, a major paradigm shift is required, in order to procure the highly automated, efficient, and reliable solutions that will not only reduce costs, but will also minimize risks to personnel and asset safety. AEROWORKS envisions a novel aerial robotic team that possesses the capability to autonomously conduct infrastructure inspection and maintenance tasks, while additionally providing intuitive and user-friendly interfaces to human-operators. The AEROWORKS robotic team will consist of multiple heterogeneous “collaborative Aerial Robotic Workers”, a new class of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles equipped with dexterous manipulators, novel physical interaction and co-manipulation control strategies, perception systems, and planning intelligence. This new generation of worker-robots will be capable of autonomously executing infrastructure inspection and maintenance works. The AEROWORKS multi-robot team will operate in a decentralized fashion, and will be characterized by unprecedented levels of reconfigurability, mission dependability, mapping fidelity, and manipulation dexterity, integrated in robust and reliable systems that are rapidly deployable and ready-to-use as an integral part of infrastructure service operations. As the project aims for direct exploitation in the infrastructure services market, its results will be demonstrated and evaluated in realistic and real infrastructure environments, with a clear focus on increased Technology Readiness Levels. The accomplishment of the envisaged scenarios will boost the European infrastructure sector, contribute to the goal of retaining Europe’s competitiveness, and particularly impact our service and industrial robotics sector, drastically changing the landscape of how robots are utilized.

Ubiquitous AI will soon allow complex systems to drive on our roads, fly over our heads, move alongside us during our daily lives & work in our factories. In spite of this disruptive landscape, deployment and broader adoption of learned-enabled autonomous systems in safety-critical scenarios remains challenging. Continuous engineering (DevOps) can mediate problems when encountering new scenarios throughout the product life cycle. However, the technical foundations and assumptions on which traditional safety engineering principles rely do not extend to learning-enabled autonomous systems engineered under continuous development. FOCETA gathers prominent academic groups & leading industrial partners to develop foundations for continuous engineering of trustworthy learning-enabled autonomous systems. The targeted scientific breakthrough lies within the convergence of “data-driven” and “model-based” engineering, where this convergence is further complicated by the need to apply verification and validation incrementally & avoid complete re-verification & re-validation efforts. FOCETA’s paradigm is built on three scientific pillars: (1) integration of learning-enabled components & model-based components via a contract-based methodology which allows incremental modification of systems including threat models for cyber-security, (2) adaptation of verification techniques applied during model-driven design to learning components in order to enable unbiased decision making, & finally, (3) incremental synthesis techniques unifying both the enforcement of safety & security-critical properties as well as the optimization of performance. FOCETA approach, implemented in open source tools & with open data exchange standards, will be applied to the most demanding & challenging applications such as urban driving automation & intelligent medical devices, to demonstrate its viability, scalability & robustness, while addressing European industry cutting-edge technology needs.