The lack of interoperability is considered as the most important barrier to achieve the global integration of IoT ecosystems across borders of different disciplines, vendors and standards. Indeed, the current IoT landscape consists of a large set of isolated islands that do not constitute a real internet, preventing the exploitation of the huge potential expected by ICT visionaries. To overcome this situation, VICINITY presents a virtual neighborhood concept, which is a decentralized, bottom-up and cross-domain approach that resembles a social network, where users can configure their set ups, integrate standards according to the services they want to use and fully control their desired level of privacy. VICINITY then automatically creates technical interoperability up to the semantic level. This allows users without technical background to get connected to the vicinity ecosystem in an easy and open way, fulfilling the consumers needs. Furthermore, the combination of services from different domains together with privacy-respectful user-defined share of information, enables synergies among services from those domains and opens the door to a new market of domain-crossing services. VICINITY's approach will be demonstrated by a large-scale demonstration connecting 8 facilities in 7 different countries. The demonstration covers various domains including energy, building automation, health and transport. VICINITY's potential to create new, domain-crossing services will be demonstrated by value added services such as micro-trading of DSM capabilities, AI-driven optimization of smart urban districts and business intelligence over IoT. Open calls are envisioned in the project to integrate further, preferably public, IoT infrastructures and to deploy additional added value services. This will not only extend the scale of VICINITY demonstration, but also efficiently raise the awareness of industrial communities of VICINITY and its capabilities.

Organisations across the sectors significantly benefit from digital transformation to support evolving business models, services and customer experience. Despite the benefits of digital infrastructure adoption, there are numerous security challenges that could pose any digital disruption and risks for the critical service delivery and overall business continuity. There is a need to understand the overall digital infrastructure context and analyse and predict the possible threats and incidents in real-time so that quick and accurate responses can be taken into consideration for ensuring resilience of service delivery. Additionally, collaborative response and sharing of threat intelligence information is necessary to create overall awareness and increase the response capability of all stakeholders within the ecosystem. CyberSecDome will integrate advanced virtuality reality (VR) to extend the capability of the security solutions aiming to enhance security, privacy and resilience of the Digital Infrastructure. The project will consider AI-enabled security solutions to provide a better prediction of cybersecurity threats and related risks towards an efficient and dynamic incident management and optimise collaborative response among the stakeholders within the Digital Infrastructure ecosystem. CyberSecDome project is built on a collaboration of 15 organisations from 6 EU member states (IT, DE, IE, SE, EL, CY) and 2 affiliated countries (UK, CH), which is composed by 5 industrial partners, 6 scientific partners and 5 SMEs. The project will be coordinate by MAGGIOLI SPA.

Smart grid represents a significant new technology of improving the efficiency, reliability, and economics of the production, transmission, and distribution of electricity. It is crucial to exchange and use information for performing smart grid applications. However, in reality the exchange of information over multiple networks is unreliable, leading to unpredictable network Quality-of-Service and thus unreliable smart grid applications. What’s worse, there are massive data, including metering data and measurement data, structured or unstructured, making it challenging to exploit useful information. Hence, there is an urgent need to solve the research problem: how to coordinate multiple networks to reliably transmit data, and then manage ICT system resources to efficiently extract useful information for supporting smart grid applications? TESTBED is a major interdisciplinary project that combines wisdoms in three academic disciplines - Electronics Engineering, Power Engineering and Computing Sciences, to address the aforesaid problem. The main focus is on improving the communication layer interoperability and the efficiency of data analytic. Regarding the communication layer interoperability, this project intends to develop and evaluate function-driven communication frameworks. Moreover, this project will develop and verify new data integration and analytic techniques for enhancing power grid operations. These developed frameworks and methods will be extensively tested and evaluated in 4 well-equipped Laboratories at HWU, EPRI, ICCS, and CAS. They will not only support the SGAM Framework, but also complement and enhance International Standards. Overall, the main objective of this project is to coordinate the action of 5 Universities and 3 enterprises, working in the field of ICT and smart grid from both EU and China, to build and test sophisticated ICT, thereby facilitating the successful implementation of smart grid applications.

The success of 5G technologies depends closely on their ability to attract vertical stakeholders, seeking the move of their services from cloud to the edge to meet unique KPIs. 5G-INDUCE project is based on the belief that such attractiveness requires vertical stakeholders and Network Application (nApp) developers to be able to smoothly deploy and manage applications in distributed 5G network environments, in a secure fashion and with strict KPI requirements. 5G-INDUCE relies on the deployment of an open ETSI NFV compatible 5G orchestration platform for the deployment of advanced 5G nApps. The platform’s unique features provide the capability to the nApp developers to define and modify the application requirements while the underlay intelligent OSS can expose the network capabilities to the end users on the application level without revealing any infrastructure related information. This process enables an application-oriented network management and optimization approach that is in line with the operator’s role as manager of its own facilities, while it offers the operational environment to any developers and service providers through which tailored made applications can be designed and deployed, for the benefit of vertical industries and without any indirect dependency through a cloud provider. The project focuses on the Industry 4.0 vertical sector, as one of the fastest growing and most impactful sectors in European economy with high potentials for service development SMEs and with the capability to tackle all diverse cases of service requirements. The platform is integrated over 3 5G Experimentation Facilities in Spain, Greece, and Italy, and extended with links towards specific Industries, for the showcasing of nApps in real 5G environment. The consortium includes all the required stakeholders (MNOs, Industries, System integrators and SMEs) from the benefited business sectors evaluated in the project, while significant part of the work (>50%) is conducted by innovative SMEs.

The 5+ Bn km of currently installed data communications optical fibre cable provides an opportunity to create a globe-spanning network of fibre sensors, without laying any new fibres. These traverse the seas and oceans, where conventional sensors are practically non-extent, and major infrastructures, offering potential for smart structural health monitoring. ECSTATIC will develop novel interferometry and polarisation-based sensing approaches for vibration and acoustic fibre-optic sensing technologies. New possibilities will be defined for sensitivity, distance range and localization, offering a range of solutions for different use cases, while ensuring the coexistence of the sensing signal with live data traffic. A new compact photonic chip-based dual-microcomb engine will enable enhanced range, resolution, and bandwidth of distributed acoustic sensing together with fundamental new knowledge on the physics of physical stimuli in relation to state-of-polarisation sensing. Simultaneous interrogation of multiple transmitted comb lines in the microwave domain with multi-wavelength interferometry and novel state-of-polarisation millisecond field programmable gate array-based transceivers will be developed and characterised to improve the sensitivity, spatial resolution, and dynamic range of distributed fiber sensors. To address the limited data storage and processing capabilities of communication networks new digital signal processing algorithms based on edge devices and artificial intelligence/machine learning will be developed and used to extract information via data-compression techniques. Solutions will aim to minimise algorithm complexity while realising real-time sensing of events and network condition with high classification accuracy. These technologies and algorithms will be tested in real-world submarine, metropolitan and infrastructure networks to validate their potential for early warning of seismic events, predictive maintenance, and network integrity.