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.
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
