Periodic Reporting for period 2 - AURORAL (Architecture for Unified Regional and Open digital ecosystems for Smart Communities and wider Rural Areas Large scale application)
Reporting period: 2022-07-01 to 2023-12-31
Lower population and business density make developing private businesses and public services in rural areas more challenging, negatively impacting socio-economic indicators. To address this issue, AURORAL delivers a digital community-centric ecosystem to support the smart transition of regions and communities. This provides essential services and jobs and reduces the digital divide between rural and urban areas. The project moves on three main drivers: digital, socio-economical, and environmental. The first focuses on building an open, API-based, interoperable, and integrated architecture named the AURORAL Middleware, that transparently bridges the interoperability, data management and security gap.
The socio-econimcal driver leads to creating a dense network of Smart Communities that will co-design and implement a joint platform to support their smart transformation: The SmarTomorrow Platform, which aims to bundle funds from diverse sources (European, national, regional, private) to unlock 50 million EUR, to support the roll-out of Smart Communities in Europe. Together with the AURORAL open calls, SmarTomorrow contributes support the smart transformation and to guarantee AURORAL’s longevity.
The environmental driver results from the Middleware’s support of large scale integration of green innovation, intelligent territorial management services, green governance mechanisms, climate adaptation tools and green recovery instruments. AURORAL supports the creation of a vibrant ecosystem of co-developers, service providers, and user communities to co-design, co-develop and co-implement smart innovations based on interoperability, security, and data transparency. AURORAL assists Smart Communities by enabling Smart Learning Communities and expanding the ecosystem of involved partners and local players, opening opportunities for further funding.
The AURORAL consortium unites 25 partners from 10 European countries, including 8 Pilot regions: Alentejo (PT), Penedès (ES), Piedmont (IT), Southern Burgenland (AT), Västerbotten (SE), Lapland (FI), and Hålogaland and Nordland (NO).
The socio-econimcal driver leads to creating a dense network of Smart Communities that will co-design and implement a joint platform to support their smart transformation: The SmarTomorrow Platform, which aims to bundle funds from diverse sources (European, national, regional, private) to unlock 50 million EUR, to support the roll-out of Smart Communities in Europe. Together with the AURORAL open calls, SmarTomorrow contributes support the smart transformation and to guarantee AURORAL’s longevity.
The environmental driver results from the Middleware’s support of large scale integration of green innovation, intelligent territorial management services, green governance mechanisms, climate adaptation tools and green recovery instruments. AURORAL supports the creation of a vibrant ecosystem of co-developers, service providers, and user communities to co-design, co-develop and co-implement smart innovations based on interoperability, security, and data transparency. AURORAL assists Smart Communities by enabling Smart Learning Communities and expanding the ecosystem of involved partners and local players, opening opportunities for further funding.
The AURORAL consortium unites 25 partners from 10 European countries, including 8 Pilot regions: Alentejo (PT), Penedès (ES), Piedmont (IT), Southern Burgenland (AT), Västerbotten (SE), Lapland (FI), and Hålogaland and Nordland (NO).
AURORAL started in January 2021 with the presence of Portuguese Minister of Agriculture, and the online Kick-off meeting in the presence of the Project Officers, Olavi Luotonen (DG-CONNECT) and Doris Marquardt (DG AGRI). AURORAL’s Design phase (M01-M06) focused on setting up project governance structures. The nine management-related deliverables, submitted by M03, reflect those achievements. WP2 organised workshops dedicated to Smart Villages and rural ecosystems. D2.1 sets the baseline analysis of digital rural ecosystems in Europe. Further all pilots established a local governance structure and engaged with stakeholders following the Stakeholder Engagement Plan (D9.3).
The most prominent event of the first semester was the European Regions for Smart Communities Summit 2021. The summit integrated with the overall effort to promote Living-in.EU with the presence of Commissioner Breton and President Tzitzikostas, and members of the Portuguese Government, MEP’s and regional leaders. It took place in Évora (Portugal) and mostly online due to COVID-19 in May 2021. An in-person remake was organised in May 2022, in collaboration with about 30 partners from 12 EU Member States, the H2020-dRural project, and in close cooperation with Living-in.EU. With the presence of many politicians and 63 regions, in cooperation with the European Committee of Regions the SmarTomorrow Platform was announced. Since then, the Summit gathers European, national, regional, and local stakeholders yearly to discuss promoting Smart Communities for a better tomorrow.
All those discussions supported the analysis of the pilots’ characteristics, needs and requirements (D5.9) which started the implementation phase M07–M24, where the AURORAL reference architecture was implemented. WP3 and WP4 reinforced the architecture outlined in the DoA with critical updates in privacy, data management, decentralisation, and data modelling. The inputs of the pilots formed the systems overall functionality, available services and promoted the focus on making it easy to understand, replicate, and upscale. The phase ended in December 2022, reaching all planned objectives, with the creation of AURORAL Middleware (D3.4 D4.2) and the AURORAL Service Store (D4.4 D4.5).
In the following Integration phase (M24-M36) AURORAL’s services were developed and integrated at pilot sites (D5.5. D5.10 D5.11). Seven cross cutting horizontal services have been deployed (D6.5) and financial instruments fostering their transformation into Smart Communities where identified (WP8). WP8 leveraged the partners’ knowledge and discussions in meetings, task forces and workshops to develop the concept for SmarTomorrow. The Financial Support for Third Parties mechanism started, creating the Open Call Support Desk Team (SDT), which prepared all relevant documentation (D8.4 D8.5). Innovation gaps were identified by collecting feedback from all users (WP2, WP5, D2.5). WP7 created the AURORAL Academy, an interactive online course to teach AURORAL’s technical fundamentals.
The most prominent event of the first semester was the European Regions for Smart Communities Summit 2021. The summit integrated with the overall effort to promote Living-in.EU with the presence of Commissioner Breton and President Tzitzikostas, and members of the Portuguese Government, MEP’s and regional leaders. It took place in Évora (Portugal) and mostly online due to COVID-19 in May 2021. An in-person remake was organised in May 2022, in collaboration with about 30 partners from 12 EU Member States, the H2020-dRural project, and in close cooperation with Living-in.EU. With the presence of many politicians and 63 regions, in cooperation with the European Committee of Regions the SmarTomorrow Platform was announced. Since then, the Summit gathers European, national, regional, and local stakeholders yearly to discuss promoting Smart Communities for a better tomorrow.
All those discussions supported the analysis of the pilots’ characteristics, needs and requirements (D5.9) which started the implementation phase M07–M24, where the AURORAL reference architecture was implemented. WP3 and WP4 reinforced the architecture outlined in the DoA with critical updates in privacy, data management, decentralisation, and data modelling. The inputs of the pilots formed the systems overall functionality, available services and promoted the focus on making it easy to understand, replicate, and upscale. The phase ended in December 2022, reaching all planned objectives, with the creation of AURORAL Middleware (D3.4 D4.2) and the AURORAL Service Store (D4.4 D4.5).
In the following Integration phase (M24-M36) AURORAL’s services were developed and integrated at pilot sites (D5.5. D5.10 D5.11). Seven cross cutting horizontal services have been deployed (D6.5) and financial instruments fostering their transformation into Smart Communities where identified (WP8). WP8 leveraged the partners’ knowledge and discussions in meetings, task forces and workshops to develop the concept for SmarTomorrow. The Financial Support for Third Parties mechanism started, creating the Open Call Support Desk Team (SDT), which prepared all relevant documentation (D8.4 D8.5). Innovation gaps were identified by collecting feedback from all users (WP2, WP5, D2.5). WP7 created the AURORAL Academy, an interactive online course to teach AURORAL’s technical fundamentals.
The reporting period bridges two central phases of the project, as detailed in D1.2 Project Handbook: Implementation (M07–M24) and Integration (M24–M36). The work was mostly technical and focused on implementing AURORAL in the pilot regions. Delivering the AURORAL architecture represented a significant step forward in IoT infrastructures. It has cutting-edge features such as privacy-by-design, decentralised peer to peer communication, strongly improving it over previous approaches, such as VICINITY. The adopted Distributed Ledger Technology enhances the solution’s authenticity, and the integration of market services, making it stand out from traditional systems. A total of 18 peer reviewed publications describe the advances beyond the state-of-the-art achieved by the AURORAL.
AURORAL is based on open standards which where further advanced with extension to existing semantic ontologies (D4.1). It introduced the possibility to execute federated discoveries, the ability to generate fine-grained access control via ODRL privacy policies or improved governance imperoperability.
Under WP 6&7 different horizontal services and tools have been presented to assist end users through the development of multi-sectoral/-geographical applications and services. They cover all domains of the AURORAL project. The Northbound API enables the collaboration in commodity markets along with the implementation of marketplace services (offering, requests, trading) as well as advanced services like AI and match-making services.
The technological improvement was only possible with the analysis of the user requirements carried out in close collaboration with the pilots (WP2&5) and monthly Pilot Forums.
Within the next consolidation phase (M37–M48), AURORAL will continue to update its ecosystem, and more importantly new projects and regions are welcomed via the open calls (WP8). Further WP8 aims to create a committed partnership for developing a sustainable finance ecosystem to address the financing needs of Smart Communities (D9.7 AURORAL Action Plan).
AURORAL is based on open standards which where further advanced with extension to existing semantic ontologies (D4.1). It introduced the possibility to execute federated discoveries, the ability to generate fine-grained access control via ODRL privacy policies or improved governance imperoperability.
Under WP 6&7 different horizontal services and tools have been presented to assist end users through the development of multi-sectoral/-geographical applications and services. They cover all domains of the AURORAL project. The Northbound API enables the collaboration in commodity markets along with the implementation of marketplace services (offering, requests, trading) as well as advanced services like AI and match-making services.
The technological improvement was only possible with the analysis of the user requirements carried out in close collaboration with the pilots (WP2&5) and monthly Pilot Forums.
Within the next consolidation phase (M37–M48), AURORAL will continue to update its ecosystem, and more importantly new projects and regions are welcomed via the open calls (WP8). Further WP8 aims to create a committed partnership for developing a sustainable finance ecosystem to address the financing needs of Smart Communities (D9.7 AURORAL Action Plan).