Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) play a crucial role in a variety of key sectors. However, we are not exploiting their full potential yet. Especially safety-critical systems are still deployed as standalone systems because it is currently the only way to ensure the system’s safety, security and performance simultaneously. At the same time market trends show the need for safety-critical CPS to be equipped with novel services based on smart data analytics able to improve their functionality and safety over time, while enabling access to crucial (off-device) information.
The TRANSACT European research project has developed a universally applicable distributed architecture enabling safety-critical CPS to leverage cloud and edge computing capabilities without compromising their critical requirements. Paving the way for faster, cheaper and more flexible solutions tailored to customers’ needs. These architectures enable seamless mixing of on-device, edge and cloud services and software. Furthermore, new applications are able to be flexibly, yet always securely be deployed, and independently released. A key element in the transformation is that performance, safety, security and privacy of data are guaranteed. The safeguarding of these properties has been one of the key elements in the project.
The impact of the transformation of standalone safety-critical systems into distributed safety-critical solutions will be a much faster innovation with value-based services and new business models enabled by edge and cloud services, leading to faster market introduction in the various multi-billion euro markets addressed by TRANSACT.
Companies will transform to solution providers, lowering the BoM of their products, and enabling their customers to provide cost-effective value-based services. TRANSACT will be a crucial enabler for Europe to shift towards a solution-oriented market “so as to still matter in the Embedded & Cyber-Physical Systems field of tomorrow’s world”.