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.
