Periodic Reporting for period 1 - O-CEI (Open CloudEdgeIoT Platform Uptake in Large Scale Cross-Domain Pilots)
Periodo di rendicontazione: 2025-01-01 al 2025-12-31
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.
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.
During the first year, O-CEI progressed from pilot preparation to initial reference architecture building blocks, early blueprint definitions and a first platform proof of concept. The eight pilots were formalised with harmonised scenarios, infrastructure inventories and implementation constraints, including regulatory considerations for secure cross-organisation data exchange. A traceable requirements baseline was consolidated (around 378 pilot requirements and 74 platform requirements) covering key platform capabilities and non-functional qualities such as security and interoperability. Based on this baseline, O-CEI specified core platform components and interfaces (portal/common APIs, marketplace/onboarding, blueprint product operations, monitoring/observability) with a strong focus on cross-domain identity and access management. A first proof of concept validated an end-to-end flow from marketplace publication to deployment via a Blueprint Product Operator, including an ordering flow and verifiable-credentials-based authorisation. In parallel, the blueprint lifecycle and methodology were detailed and a first set of 13 blueprint one-pagers was produced, with 7 blueprints mapped to more than one pilot to support cross-pilot reuse, and the marketplace catalogue was populated with 40+ software utilities. Finally, the project defined the automation and delivery model, prepared the assessment strategy and an initial KPI baseline for the next phases, and designed onboarding to accommodate third-party CEI utilities from the Open Calls.
O-CEI goes beyond the state of the art by demonstrating, in large-scale pilot settings, a combined approach that is rarely achieved at scale: blueprint-driven engineering of cross-domain Cloud–Edge–IoT solutions, an open reference platform spanning cloud, edge and devices, and a federated marketplace that enables governed reuse of software, data and AI assets. This addresses fragmentation of today’s compute continuum, where siloed systems and non-interoperable data sources hinder replication across organisations and sectors. In O-CEI, blueprints serve as reusable end-to-end solution specifications bridging design, deployment and reuse. They capture open interfaces, consistent data models, trust and security requirements, governance/compliance considerations and operational constraints, enabling replication while allowing local contextualisation.
Impacts are indicative at this stage and will be substantiated through pilot validation. The approach is expected to shorten time-to-deploy and facilitate replication across heterogeneous environments, improve interoperability and portability, and strengthen trusted cross-organisation data sharing through identity-based access control and traceability/auditability requirements and mechanisms. It also supports more energy-aware operation by reducing unnecessary data movement and placing workloads where they are most efficient, contributing to minimising the energy footprint of digital infrastructures supporting flexibility services. The project targets close-to-market pilot validation up to TRL 7.
For further uptake and long-term success, key needs include continued large-scale pilot deployments and operational benchmarking to validate performance, trust and replicability in real conditions, alignment with interoperability profiles and standardisation (including pre-normative work), practical compliance-by-design guidance, and sustainable governance and business models for the platform and marketplace ecosystem (open-source strategy, licensing/IPR pathways, and access to markets).
Impacts are indicative at this stage and will be substantiated through pilot validation. The approach is expected to shorten time-to-deploy and facilitate replication across heterogeneous environments, improve interoperability and portability, and strengthen trusted cross-organisation data sharing through identity-based access control and traceability/auditability requirements and mechanisms. It also supports more energy-aware operation by reducing unnecessary data movement and placing workloads where they are most efficient, contributing to minimising the energy footprint of digital infrastructures supporting flexibility services. The project targets close-to-market pilot validation up to TRL 7.
For further uptake and long-term success, key needs include continued large-scale pilot deployments and operational benchmarking to validate performance, trust and replicability in real conditions, alignment with interoperability profiles and standardisation (including pre-normative work), practical compliance-by-design guidance, and sustainable governance and business models for the platform and marketplace ecosystem (open-source strategy, licensing/IPR pathways, and access to markets).