Road2CPS has delivered a technology, application and strategy roadmap, conducted and published 10 case studies, has performed an impact and gap analysis, raised awareness and identified exploitation possibilities and disseminated the project and programmes achievements widely. Moreover, Road2CPS has organised seven workshops (roadmapping, constituency building, and clustering events) involving over 500 participants. From all activities, Road2CPS has derived recommendations for research priorities, business opportunities and innovation strategies and has published a ‘Road2CPS booklet’. The vast majority of Road2CPS results (deliverables, workshop reports) are shared with the community via the website: www.road2cps.eu.
Main results and recommendations include:
Amongst the technological topics, and related future research priorities ‘integration, interoperability, standards’ ranged highest in all workshops. Other themes of very high relevance revealed to be ‘modelling and simulation’, ‘safety and dependability’, ‘security and privacy’, ‘Big Data and real-time analysis’, ‘ubiquitous autonomy and forecasting’ as well as ‘human machine awareness’. Next to this, themes emerged including ‘decision making and support’, ‘CPS engineering’, ‘CPS life-cycle management’, ‘System-of-Systems’, ‘distributed management’, ‘cognitive CPS’, ‘emergence, complexity, adaptability and flexibility’ and work on the foundations of CPS and ‘cross-disciplinary research/CPS Science’.
Non-technological priority themes, were particularly seen to be CPS education, training and skills and business models accompanied by recommendations to address the ‘human in the loop’, and further invest in community building and collaboration on regional, national and global level as well as across domains and value chains. Demonstrators and living labs are essential to alleviate concerns and regulatory and legal issues to ensure a reliable framework. Societal dialogue and awareness-raising as well as ethics are crucial elements of future CPS development. Further recommendations include focusing EC incentives on open approaches.
Regarding the application perspective, five domains (smart city, manufacturing, energy, transport and health) have been analysed for their specific needs and barriers for successful CPS deployment. Many similarities, especially for the underlying technologies, but also domain specific differences could be observed. Main barriers include missing interoperability, integration and standards, the fragmentation of initiatives and across application domains and missing skills. A major showstopper, next to high implementation costs and missing demonstrations are concerns regarding security, privacy, and confidentiality. Business related barriers include missing business models, missing openness (open data) and vendor lock, missing legal frameworks, regulation, IPR protection, liability and concerns regarding multiple ownership. Conservatism and resistance to change in some sectors and countries are barriers together with difficult access especially for SMEs. Moreover, social acceptance and awareness need to be ensured and ethical concerns need to be overcome.
Road2CPS recommendations and innovation strategies target catalysing progress in key technological and non-technological fields, broadening their applications and enabling new business, following a cross-disciplinary, multi-domain and inclusive approach, to best benefit economy and society as a whole. Building an ecosystem to bring relevant stakeholders together, creating a mind-set open to innovation and fostering investment in a focussed way, is seen as key for a successful path towards the future.
