Aligning Reference Architectures, Open Platforms and Large Scale Pilots in Digitising European Industry

Project Information

OPEN DEI

Grant agreement ID: 857065

DOI

10.3030/857065

Project closed

EC signature date 22 May 2019

Start date 1 June 2019

End date 31 December 2022

Funded under

• INDUSTRIAL LEADERSHIP - Leadership in enabling and industrial technologies - Information and Communication Technologies (ICT)

Total cost

€ 2 022 687,50

EU contribution

€ 2 022 687,50

Coordinated by

IDC ITALIA SRL
Italy

Periodic Reporting for period 2 - OPEN DEI (Aligning Reference Architectures, Open Platforms and Large Scale Pilots in Digitising European Industry)

Reporting period: 2020-12-01 to 2022-12-31

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

OPEN DEI’s objectives and activities are directly related to the Digitising European Industry initiative that the EC launched in April 2016 to reinforce the EU's competitiveness in digital technologies and to ensure that every industry in Europe, in whichever sector, wherever situated, and no matter of what size can fully benefit from digital innovations. OPEN DEI therefore aims to leverage synergies, identify gaps, share best practices, reinforce regional/national relationships as well as put in place the necessary joint measures to implement common dissemination, communication, training and exploitation action plans in four innovation streams.
- In terms of Platform Building, OPEN DEI aims at studying and harmonising reference architectures (RAs) in the EU and worldwide in the different domains covered by the Digital Transformation (DT) focus area (Manufacturing, Energy, Agri-food and Healthcare).
- In terms of Large-Scale Piloting, OPEN DEI aims to harmonise different methods and tools to assess Digital Maturity in Industry, taking inspiration from the DE-FR-IT National assessment methods developed in the Trilateral cooperation agreement.
- In terms of Ecosystem Building, OPEN DEI aims at creating an ecosystem among the four domains and promoting the adoption of the ENG DIHIWARE platform in the IAs in order to manage and coordinate innovation and human collaboration, including social networking.
- As far as Standardisation is concerned, the EU has recognised that Standardisation is a powerful and strategic tool for improving the efficiency of European policies. Indeed, the EU pays significant care on standards as they can influence most areas of public concern such as the competitiveness of industry, the functioning of the Single Market, the protection of the environment and of human health, as well as the enhancement of innovation.
- OPEN DEI also pursues a set of dissemination and communication objectives, in particular: Bringing the stakeholders into the OPEN DEI community; and Impact on the external SMEs and start-ups as well as Standardisation communities.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

During the period under consideration (M1-M18) the project has pursued the following initiatives:
• With regards to the co-ordination, co-operation and cohesion, the project has appointed a Domain Ambassador Coordinator responsible for the harmonisation of the four domains covered by the project.
• A Reference Architecture for cross-domain Digital Transformation is now set-in place as the first version of the Digital Navigator of Open Source components for OPEN DEI.
• OPEN DEI has also developed awareness about the piloting activities of the Platform projects, to identify synergies and to create standardisation to measure the global indicators (KPI) of the initiative going beyond individual platform projects.
• OPEN DEI set in place an ecosystem among existing and new DIHs and provide common services and training activities able to deploy new services and design a catalogue of industrial skills dedicated to SMEs. In this respect, the project has delivered three Webinars with a domain and cross-domain perspective:
• In the sectoral and cross-sectoral domains, OPEN DEI has also successfully launched a series of Working Groups and Task forces.
• As for cross sectoral activities, Open DEI has launched four different “Task Forces” with the aim to provide a common environment where to collaborate with pilots and projects in the four different domains around shared initiatives leading to tangible results and outputs. The four OPEN DEI Task Forces are:
• AT the time of writing TF 1 has submitted a common paper on data spaces and the other task forces will provide theirs in the first half of 2021.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

During the first 18 months of the OPEN DEI project, the partners worked towards strengthening the EU leadership for the implementation of an Open Reference Architecture in the four domains touched by OPEN DEI (Manufacturing, Agri-food, Healthcare, Energy in collaboration with the IAs), taking into account the multi-disciplinary approach of the DEI initiative, building a network of coordinated innovation hubs in this field and starting the implementation of the first version of the Navigator to contribute to the creation of new services, especially for SMEs.
In the meantime, partners worked towards the benchmarking tool, tracking both previous and ongoing programs and initiatives in Big Data and IoT Large Scale Pilots. The improvement of this instruments has been done in two ways, starting from a face-to-face meeting held in February 2020 for a fruitful first getting-in-touch with Pilots and collection of their feedback, and by the effective realization of the web-based survey tool to collect information regarding the projects covered by OPEN DEI and other initiatives, useful to identify gaps in the actual methodology adopted in the Innovation Actions supported by the project.
EU leadership in Digital Platforms for Industry also depends on the capability to build a network of coordinated innovation hubs in this field. During the referred months, OPEN DEI worked towards the definition of a coordinated workflows of Platform/Pilots services to grow pan-EU awareness of DT-ICT IAs, by supporting the enlargement of the ecosystem, creating a DT community across the four domains. The existing DIHs networks have been involved and, at M18, the beta version of the DIHIWARE instance for OPEN DEI has been setup and will be further improved to support an ecosystem of EU-borne digital assets (people, organisations, technologies, experiments and knowledge) and inter-IAs collaboration in the four areas and to connect with relevant DIHs in the DT domain.
The activities performed so far, have been profusely disseminated by the mean of events, webinars, position papers, and sector dedicated events. The communication & dissemination did not stop even in times of Covid-19 pandemic and the Ambassadors were able to build and nurture a network of several Working Groups and four distinct Task Forces on data sharing spaces, business ecosystem, digital platforms & pilots and business impact and KPIs.

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