Periodic Reporting for period 2 - Arrowhead FPVN (Arrowhead Flexible Production Value Networks)
Reporting period: 2024-06-01 to 2025-05-31
The Arrowhead fPVN project addresses one of the most pressing challenges of Europe’s industrial landscape: achieving seamless digital transformation across highly diverse and distributed production value networks (PVNs). Modern industries such as automotive, aerospace, and process manufacturing rely on increasingly complex systems of systems, where data must be exchanged reliably between heterogeneous platforms, standards, and organizations. However, the lack of interoperability and the heavy reliance on manual integration processes significantly increase costs, reduce flexibility, and slow down innovation.
Arrowhead fPVN responds to this need by developing an open, microservice-based framework that enables autonomous translation of industrial data models, dynamic deployment of services, and governance of cyber-physical systems of systems (CPSoS). The project builds on the Eclipse Arrowhead platform, advancing it to a new generation (v5.0) that supports flexible and scalable integration in real industrial environments. The solution integrates ontology-based, AI-based, and model-based translation services, combined with a domain-specific language (DSL) to automate system design and deployment.
The overall objectives of Arrowhead fPVN are:
- To reduce the need for manual data handling by enabling more than 50% of required translations to be performed autonomously by machine-based services.
- To mature microservice- and service-oriented architectures that allow dynamic, secure, and scalable deployment of interoperable solutions.
- To provide updates and semantic extensions to major industrial data models and standards, supporting international alignment and uptake.
- To demonstrate these advances in demanding industrial use cases spanning automotive, aerospace, and process industries.
- To establish sustainable governance of an open-source architecture, ensuring long-term adoption and impact across European industry.
By pursuing these objectives, Arrowhead fPVN contributes directly to European priorities on digital transformation, Industry 5.0 and sustainable industrial competitiveness. The project supports policy initiatives such as the EU’s Digital Strategy and the push for interoperable Digital Product Passports by ensuring that industrial data can flow seamlessly across domains, companies, and borders.
The project’s expected impacts are significant in scale: lower engineering costs for digitalisation and automation, faster time-to-market for innovative products and services, improved resilience of industrial ecosystems, and greater uptake of open European standards. Social sciences and humanities play an important role by guiding the analysis of workforce adaptation, ethical use of AI-enabled systems, and socio-economic impacts of digital transformation. This ensures that the technological advances foster not only industrial efficiency, but also inclusiveness, trust, and sustainability in Europe’s digital future.
Arrowhead fPVN responds to this need by developing an open, microservice-based framework that enables autonomous translation of industrial data models, dynamic deployment of services, and governance of cyber-physical systems of systems (CPSoS). The project builds on the Eclipse Arrowhead platform, advancing it to a new generation (v5.0) that supports flexible and scalable integration in real industrial environments. The solution integrates ontology-based, AI-based, and model-based translation services, combined with a domain-specific language (DSL) to automate system design and deployment.
The overall objectives of Arrowhead fPVN are:
- To reduce the need for manual data handling by enabling more than 50% of required translations to be performed autonomously by machine-based services.
- To mature microservice- and service-oriented architectures that allow dynamic, secure, and scalable deployment of interoperable solutions.
- To provide updates and semantic extensions to major industrial data models and standards, supporting international alignment and uptake.
- To demonstrate these advances in demanding industrial use cases spanning automotive, aerospace, and process industries.
- To establish sustainable governance of an open-source architecture, ensuring long-term adoption and impact across European industry.
By pursuing these objectives, Arrowhead fPVN contributes directly to European priorities on digital transformation, Industry 5.0 and sustainable industrial competitiveness. The project supports policy initiatives such as the EU’s Digital Strategy and the push for interoperable Digital Product Passports by ensuring that industrial data can flow seamlessly across domains, companies, and borders.
The project’s expected impacts are significant in scale: lower engineering costs for digitalisation and automation, faster time-to-market for innovative products and services, improved resilience of industrial ecosystems, and greater uptake of open European standards. Social sciences and humanities play an important role by guiding the analysis of workforce adaptation, ethical use of AI-enabled systems, and socio-economic impacts of digital transformation. This ensures that the technological advances foster not only industrial efficiency, but also inclusiveness, trust, and sustainability in Europe’s digital future.
Arrowhead fPVN advanced its technical foundation with major progress in autonomous translation services, microservice-based architectures, semantic modeling, and industrial validation. Demonstrators in automotive, aerospace, and process industries moved from concept to validated prototypes, including AI-powered EV battery data translation, noise-resilient human–machine interaction, predictive maintenance with digital twins, and interoperable solutions for process industry operations and sustainability reporting.
Key achievements include the delivery of second-generation translation services (ontology-, AI- and model-based), maturation of the Eclipse Arrowhead v5.0 platform with AI-assisted orchestration, development of semantic extensions to industrial standards (ISO, DEXPI, CFIHOS), and deployment of Arrowhead Local Clouds in industrial pilots. The project also initiated a Digital Transformation Framework, consolidating methodologies into a structure that supports large-scale industrial adoption.
Overall, Arrowhead fPVN has progressed from early prototypes to verified usage in industrial demonstrators where feasibility validation is currently on-going.
For a set of standardized data model technology for their integration and translation has been demonstrated supported by the upcoming standards ISO 23726-3. An official liaison between Arrowhead fPVN and ISO WG184/SC4 has been requested (and been approved and announced Sept 2025.
Key achievements include the delivery of second-generation translation services (ontology-, AI- and model-based), maturation of the Eclipse Arrowhead v5.0 platform with AI-assisted orchestration, development of semantic extensions to industrial standards (ISO, DEXPI, CFIHOS), and deployment of Arrowhead Local Clouds in industrial pilots. The project also initiated a Digital Transformation Framework, consolidating methodologies into a structure that supports large-scale industrial adoption.
Overall, Arrowhead fPVN has progressed from early prototypes to verified usage in industrial demonstrators where feasibility validation is currently on-going.
For a set of standardized data model technology for their integration and translation has been demonstrated supported by the upcoming standards ISO 23726-3. An official liaison between Arrowhead fPVN and ISO WG184/SC4 has been requested (and been approved and announced Sept 2025.
Arrowhead fPVN has gone beyond the state of the art by delivering autonomous translation services, advanced microservice-based architectures, semantic extensions to industrial standards, and validated demonstrators in automotive, aerospace, and process industries. Tools such as the DITAG translator generator, AI-powered pipelines, and the Arrowhead DSL embedded in Papyrus enable automation and interoperability well beyond existing solutions. The project has also actively influenced global standards (ISO, DEXPI, CFIHOS), positioning Europe as a leader in semantic interoperability. Industrial pilots proved the feasibility of machine-learning-enabled data translation, noise-resilient human–machine communication, predictive maintenance, and digital twins. These results promise major impacts in cost reduction, faster innovation, resilience, and alignment with EU priorities like the Digital Product Passport. For uptake, continued AI research, large-scale pilots, stronger links to international standards, market access, and sustainable open-source governance are essential.