InterConnect envisages to contribute for the democratization of efficient energy management, through a flexible and interoperable ecosystem where demand side flexibility can be soundly integrated with effective benefits to end-users. In fact, over the last few years several projects and technology providers have come up with solutions that allow every energy user to have awareness and control over his appliances, but there has always been a major issue with interoperability. End-users should be able to choose and change their technology providers, without having to replace their installation, every time they feel this need and still be able to adopt sustainable behaviour and benefit from technological advances. In the energy sector, a steep move towards digital is occurring and becoming tremendously user-centric and market-driven. The system dimension is significant, as the number of energy service providers is increasing thanks to favourable regulatory environment and technology advancements for monitoring and control. This is the reason why this consortium integrates relevant partners from all the representative stakeholders in this new energy paradigm. Specific competences in ICT, IoT, energy, data science, software, were included and the full value chain, from R&D institutions, manufacturers, DSO, retailers, IT providers, and energy users is represented. To guarantee a higher Europe-wide impact, several relevant associations related with ICT and energy are also involved. To achieve a significant dimension, 7 large scale pilots, in different countries and with different end-users, are foreseen to guarantee representativeness and dimension in terms of number of appliances and services. The overarching objective of these pilots is to demonstrate a real digital market environment over electrical systems with significant amounts of DSF, reducing operational and investment costs that will benefit energy end-users and help EU achieve its energy efficiency objectives.

Automated driving is expected to increase safety, provide more comfort and create many new business opportunities for mobility services. The market size is expected to grow gradually reaching 50% of the market in 2035. The IoT is about enabling connections between objects or "things"; it’s about connecting anything, anytime, anyplace, using any service over any network. There is little doubt that these vehicles will be part of the IoT revolution. Indeed, connectivity and IoT have the capacity for disruptive impacts on highly and fully automated driving along all value chains towards a global vision of Smart Anything Everywhere. In order to stay competitive, the European automotive industry is investing in connected and automated driving with cars becoming moving “objects” in an IoT ecosystem eventually participating in BigData for Mobility. AUTOPILOT brings IoT into the automotive world to transform connected vehicles into highly and fully automated vehicle. The well-balanced AUTOPILOT consortium represents all relevant areas of the IoT eco-system. IoT open vehicle platform and an IoT architecture will be developed based on the existing and forthcoming standards as well as open source and vendor solutions. Thanks to AUTOPILOT, the IoT eco-system will involve vehicles, road infrastructure and surrounding objects in the IoT, with a particular attention to safety critical aspects of automated driving. AUTOPILOT will develop new services on top of IoT to involve autonomous driving vehicles, like autonomous car sharing, automated parking, or enhanced digital dynamic maps to allow fully autonomous driving. AUTOPILOT IoT enabled autonomous driving cars will be tested, in real conditions, at four permanent large scale pilot sites in Finland, France, Netherlands and Italy, whose test results will allow multi-criteria evaluations (Technical, user, business, legal) of the IoT impact on pushing the level of autonomous driving.