O-CEI (Open CloudEdgeIoT Platform Uptake in Large-Scale Cross-Domain Pilots) addresses a key European need by helping strong industrial value chains, innovative SMEs, and breakthrough open-source research results translate into deployable, replicable Cloud-Edge-IoT solutions that break data silos and strengthen Europe’s competitiveness and open strategic autonomy, aligned with European values. Today, strategic sectors still suffer from fragmented and siloed systems, making trusted cross-organisation data sharing and scalable deployment difficult and costly. At the same time, the EU is pursuing digital, compute and energy sovereignty and the green transition, where energy flexibility increasingly depends on real-time information and resource sharing, supported by edge capabilities that reduce latency and enable efficient operation.
The project’s overarching objective is to accelerate the uptake and upscaling of cutting-edge Cloud-Edge-IoT (CEI) solutions by demonstrating real-world energy-flexibility use cases through reusable “blueprints”, providing an open platform as a reference point for deploying CEI solutions, leveraging proven open-source results and automated, secure-by-design deployment and operations practices to support repeatable integration, deployment and updates across heterogeneous cloud and edge environments, shaping a transferable business strategy informed by stakeholders, and maximising long-term impact through standardisation and ecosystem building. Energy flexibility is the cross-domain unifying thread of O-CEI, connecting pilots and reuse through common blueprints and platform capabilities.
O-CEI validates this pathway to impact through eight large-scale pilots across multiple electricity grids, e-mobility (including V2G and secure EV charging), software-defined vehicles, logistics and maritime terminals/ports, and agrifood/agriculture, complemented by an urban pilot that addresses citizen engagement and social acceptability of energy flexibility. The expected impact is facilitated replication of trusted CEI solutions across value chains, reduced fragmentation and lock-in risks through open interfaces and shared semantics, and more energy-aware digital infrastructures that support flexibility services at scale.
Beyond the consortium, O-CEI will reinforce uptake through Financial Support to Third Parties via two Open Calls, aiming to support up to 32 third-party projects (up to 24 upscaling providers and 8 uptake use cases) to extend the platform with new CEI utilities and deployments.
