Periodic Reporting for period 2 - CPS4EU (Cyber Physical Systems for Europe)
Reporting period: 2020-07-01 to 2021-06-30
In recent years, Cyber Physical Systems (CPS) technologies have become a game changer in strategic sectors such as Automotive, Energy and Industry Automation, where Europe is a world leader. In fact, CPS is a key driver for the innovation capacity of European industries, large and small, generating economic growth and supporting meaningful jobs for citizens. CPS4EU aims to arm Europe with extensive value chain across key sectors by:
1. Strengthening CPS Technology providers, mainly European SMEs, to increase their market share and their competitiveness to become world leaders
2. Improve design efficiency and productivity and enable secure certification
3. Enabling the creation of innovative European CPS products that will strengthen the leadership and competitiveness of Europe by both large groups and SMEs
4. Large Dissemination of CPS technologies.
To achieve these goals CPS4EU will:
1. Develop 4 key enabling technologies (computing, connectivity, sensing, cooperative systems)
2. Incorporate these CPS modules through pre-integrated architectures and design tools
3. Instantiate these architectures in dedicated use cases from strategic application: automotive, smart grid and industry automation
4. Improve CPS awareness and usage for all industrial sectors
The overall goals, and the organization have been confirmed during the 2nd year of the project. Minor adjustments on the use cases have been performed. And two more pre-architectures have been implemented to reflect the practical needs of the involved partners.
CPS4EU gathers major large companies (VALEO, THALES, TRUMPF, RTE, LEONARDO, and SCHNEIDER ELECTRIC), a large set of innovative SMEs and world-class research centres (CEA, INRIA, CNRS, VICOM, BME, UNISA, TUC, UNA, ITI) to significantly reduce the development time and certification efforts through pan European collaboration, knowledge exchange and access to the strong value chain in strategic markets.
CPS4EU builds on a strong foundation in European and national initiatives. It will enable the European industry to lead strategic markets thanks to high level sharing of CPS technologies across sectors all along the value chain.
1. Strengthening CPS Technology providers, mainly European SMEs, to increase their market share and their competitiveness to become world leaders
2. Improve design efficiency and productivity and enable secure certification
3. Enabling the creation of innovative European CPS products that will strengthen the leadership and competitiveness of Europe by both large groups and SMEs
4. Large Dissemination of CPS technologies.
To achieve these goals CPS4EU will:
1. Develop 4 key enabling technologies (computing, connectivity, sensing, cooperative systems)
2. Incorporate these CPS modules through pre-integrated architectures and design tools
3. Instantiate these architectures in dedicated use cases from strategic application: automotive, smart grid and industry automation
4. Improve CPS awareness and usage for all industrial sectors
The overall goals, and the organization have been confirmed during the 2nd year of the project. Minor adjustments on the use cases have been performed. And two more pre-architectures have been implemented to reflect the practical needs of the involved partners.
CPS4EU gathers major large companies (VALEO, THALES, TRUMPF, RTE, LEONARDO, and SCHNEIDER ELECTRIC), a large set of innovative SMEs and world-class research centres (CEA, INRIA, CNRS, VICOM, BME, UNISA, TUC, UNA, ITI) to significantly reduce the development time and certification efforts through pan European collaboration, knowledge exchange and access to the strong value chain in strategic markets.
CPS4EU builds on a strong foundation in European and national initiatives. It will enable the European industry to lead strategic markets thanks to high level sharing of CPS technologies across sectors all along the value chain.
During the second year of the project, the overall goals for the project were:
- Design freeze of the use cases
- First prototypes ready
These overall goals were reached, with several clarifications mentioned herebelow:
- The project consortium clarified the concept of Pre-Integrated Architectures (PIARCH) as an extension of the Design Pattern concept. Another extension to the original concept comes from the flexibility introduced in the CPS4EU PIARCH concept: for the instantiations of PIARCHs leading to the CPS4EU prototype, the partners have the possibility to reduce the content of the PIARCH to their needs, or to incorporate legacy components or their future own improvements.
- For the needs of the use case developments, the consortium decided to increase the number of PIARCHs in the project. The ‘Industrial Gateway’ PIARCH was added to match the needs of the industrial use cases in WP8. The ‘Sensing’ PIARCH was divided in ‘Sensing Perception’ and ‘Sensing Localization’ PIARCHs, mainly for the needs of the automotive use cases in WP7.
- The development of the first use case and prototype is progressing well and according to the plan.
The second year of the project confirmed the good synergies and the positive mindset which drive the joint activities within the CPS4EU project. In addition:
- The contributions of the CPS4EU project as part of the digital transformation are confirmed, especially vs IOT and Edge Computing, and in line with the evolutions of complex system architectures.
- The COVID-19 crisis had a ‘medium size’ impact on the project. If the crisis continues for the third year of the project, then the impact may be more important due to the necessary physical integration and validation of the use case prototypes.
- The actions related to the dissemination of the results have also progressed during the second year with BOOM committees. The main actions are related to the creation of ID cards for each project result that the partners want to sell. A first version of 31 ID cards is already available, for the 6 PIARCHs, for the 16 use case prototypes, and 9 other sub-systems or tools.
- The contacts with other projects continue. Joint workshops are planned in 11/2021 with ArrowHeadTools (ECSEL). A joint webinar is being considered with the TEACHING (H2020) project and expert meetings are considered with the COSMOS (H2020) project.
- Design freeze of the use cases
- First prototypes ready
These overall goals were reached, with several clarifications mentioned herebelow:
- The project consortium clarified the concept of Pre-Integrated Architectures (PIARCH) as an extension of the Design Pattern concept. Another extension to the original concept comes from the flexibility introduced in the CPS4EU PIARCH concept: for the instantiations of PIARCHs leading to the CPS4EU prototype, the partners have the possibility to reduce the content of the PIARCH to their needs, or to incorporate legacy components or their future own improvements.
- For the needs of the use case developments, the consortium decided to increase the number of PIARCHs in the project. The ‘Industrial Gateway’ PIARCH was added to match the needs of the industrial use cases in WP8. The ‘Sensing’ PIARCH was divided in ‘Sensing Perception’ and ‘Sensing Localization’ PIARCHs, mainly for the needs of the automotive use cases in WP7.
- The development of the first use case and prototype is progressing well and according to the plan.
The second year of the project confirmed the good synergies and the positive mindset which drive the joint activities within the CPS4EU project. In addition:
- The contributions of the CPS4EU project as part of the digital transformation are confirmed, especially vs IOT and Edge Computing, and in line with the evolutions of complex system architectures.
- The COVID-19 crisis had a ‘medium size’ impact on the project. If the crisis continues for the third year of the project, then the impact may be more important due to the necessary physical integration and validation of the use case prototypes.
- The actions related to the dissemination of the results have also progressed during the second year with BOOM committees. The main actions are related to the creation of ID cards for each project result that the partners want to sell. A first version of 31 ID cards is already available, for the 6 PIARCHs, for the 16 use case prototypes, and 9 other sub-systems or tools.
- The contacts with other projects continue. Joint workshops are planned in 11/2021 with ArrowHeadTools (ECSEL). A joint webinar is being considered with the TEACHING (H2020) project and expert meetings are considered with the COSMOS (H2020) project.
From a general perspective, the Components, the Tools and the PIARCHs developed in CPS4EU are at the State of the Art. Most of them target embedded applications with low to medium range computing (up to few tens of TOPS) performance. We believe that CPS4EU advances beyond the State of the Art will take place at the integration level, with its PIARCH paradigm reducing the effort necessary to develop complex Cyber-Physical Systems. On top of the new PIARCH approach, it appears that this PIARCH paradigm will also enable the future addition of new non-functional features like cybersecurity, privacy, traceability of licenses and IP rights, tracking of CO2 footprint, product configurator, which are needed by the new digitized markets.
CPS4EU is a mean to ensure a comprehensive CPS ecosystem in Europe by supporting, with the help of research institutions, both CPS technology providers and CPS integrators, thus leading to a sovereign European CPS procurement chain. Another main objective is to provide the CPS actors, a framework of innovative solutions to enhance their competitiveness.
The main impact for technology providers lays on the ability to create new products or allow the refurbishment the existing ones into new generation products, taking full advantage of advanced concepts and high-end electronic components offered by the CPS4EU project. The concept of pre-integrated architecture is iconic of this guiding line of CPS4EU, which directly reflects on the expected revenues coming from the new/evolved product sales.
The expected impact for large groups and SMEs may be measured by new products, at the state of the art, or improved generation of existing products developed in CPS4EU. Beyond their role of component and tool providers, another business impact was ‘discovered’ for SMEs during the second year of the project. The SMEs willing to enter in new markets can benefit from the usage of PIARCHs to enable a fast market penetration with state-of-the-art CPS, with reasonable development efforts.
Of course, a large system (autonomous vehicle, industrial operation, or energy distribution) results of a large number of innovations and even if CPS4EU will be a large contributor in the addressed markets, it will not be the only source of innovation. The expected impact for large groups needs then to be evaluated using more adapted criteria than simple financial ROI. In CPS4EU 5 criteria have been used by industrial partners. These are:
- Strengthening of the value chain: this is the main objective of the project and it should benefit to all large enterprises contributing to CPS4EU
- Acceleration of the time to market for new products
- Reducing design cost and overall Research and Design and Development effort
- Better qualification/ certification/ control
- Direct increase of sales, and opportunities to reach new markets
CPS4EU is a mean to ensure a comprehensive CPS ecosystem in Europe by supporting, with the help of research institutions, both CPS technology providers and CPS integrators, thus leading to a sovereign European CPS procurement chain. Another main objective is to provide the CPS actors, a framework of innovative solutions to enhance their competitiveness.
The main impact for technology providers lays on the ability to create new products or allow the refurbishment the existing ones into new generation products, taking full advantage of advanced concepts and high-end electronic components offered by the CPS4EU project. The concept of pre-integrated architecture is iconic of this guiding line of CPS4EU, which directly reflects on the expected revenues coming from the new/evolved product sales.
The expected impact for large groups and SMEs may be measured by new products, at the state of the art, or improved generation of existing products developed in CPS4EU. Beyond their role of component and tool providers, another business impact was ‘discovered’ for SMEs during the second year of the project. The SMEs willing to enter in new markets can benefit from the usage of PIARCHs to enable a fast market penetration with state-of-the-art CPS, with reasonable development efforts.
Of course, a large system (autonomous vehicle, industrial operation, or energy distribution) results of a large number of innovations and even if CPS4EU will be a large contributor in the addressed markets, it will not be the only source of innovation. The expected impact for large groups needs then to be evaluated using more adapted criteria than simple financial ROI. In CPS4EU 5 criteria have been used by industrial partners. These are:
- Strengthening of the value chain: this is the main objective of the project and it should benefit to all large enterprises contributing to CPS4EU
- Acceleration of the time to market for new products
- Reducing design cost and overall Research and Design and Development effort
- Better qualification/ certification/ control
- Direct increase of sales, and opportunities to reach new markets