Report

Teaser, summary, work performed and final results

Periodic Reporting for period 2 - Road2CPS (Strategic action for future CPS through roadmaps, impact multiplication and constituency building)

Teaser

The term Cyber-Physical System (CPS) describes hardware-software systems, which tightly couple the physical world and the virtual world. They are established from networked embedded systems that are connected with the outside world through sensors and actuators and have the...

Summary

The term Cyber-Physical System (CPS) describes hardware-software systems, which tightly couple the physical world and the virtual world. They are established from networked embedded systems that are connected with the outside world through sensors and actuators and have the capability to collaborate, adapt, and evolve. Challenges like increasing complexity and flexibility and the need to optimise performance and comply with essential requirements like safety and security raise many questions in areas such as transport, health, production, smart grids and smart cities. CPSs are already part of our daily lives, and have affected the way humans interact with their environment. For European industries, there is large potential as digitisation/CPS will change the way business value is generated from products and services. Nevertheless, there is still a huge gap between theoretical concepts, technical developments and successful application, as well as considerable differences with regard to propagation and maturity of CPS between application domains and along the value chain. Strategic action is needed to bring the relevant stakeholders together and to facilitate mutually beneficial collaborations between them. Road2CPS was conceived to respond to this situation by:
-Analysing impact from past and ongoing projects, identifying gaps and bridging efforts towards impact multiplication
-Raising awareness and disseminating programme achievements
-Developing technology, application and innovation strategy roadmaps for CPS to serve as a catalyst for early adoption of CPS
-Enhancing CPS implementation and exposing exploitation opportunities via case studies
-Developing recommendations for future research priorities and implementation strategies
-Building a CPS constituency, bringing key players together to contribute to the Road2CPS action plan

Within the two years of activity (02/2015-01/2017), the Road2CPS project has addressed all these objectives successfully. It has identified and analysed relevant technology fields and related research priorities to fuel the development of trustworthy CPS, as well as gaps, needs and barriers for a successful implementation in different application domains and derived recommendations for strategic action. It brought over 500 stakeholders together in various project-organised events and disseminated the projects and programmes results and achievements widely.

Work performed

Road2CPS has delivered a technology, application and strategy roadmap, conducted and published 10 case studies, has performed an impact and gap analysis, raised awareness and identified exploitation possibilities and disseminated the project and programmes achievements widely. Moreover, Road2CPS has organised seven workshops (roadmapping, constituency building, and clustering events) involving over 500 participants. From all activities, Road2CPS has derived recommendations for research priorities, business opportunities and innovation strategies and has published a ‘Road2CPS booklet’. The vast majority of Road2CPS results (deliverables, workshop reports) are shared with the community via the website: www.road2cps.eu.
Main results and recommendations include:
Amongst the technological topics, and related future research priorities ‘integration, interoperability, standards’ ranged highest in all workshops. Other themes of very high relevance revealed to be ‘modelling and simulation’, ‘safety and dependability’, ‘security and privacy’, ‘Big Data and real-time analysis’, ‘ubiquitous autonomy and forecasting’ as well as ‘human machine awareness’. Next to this, themes emerged including ‘decision making and support’, ‘CPS engineering’, ‘CPS life-cycle management’, ‘System-of-Systems’, ‘distributed management’, ‘cognitive CPS’, ‘emergence, complexity, adaptability and flexibility’ and work on the foundations of CPS and ‘cross-disciplinary research/CPS Science’.
Non-technological priority themes, were particularly seen to be CPS education, training and skills and business models accompanied by recommendations to address the ‘human in the loop’, and further invest in community building and collaboration on regional, national and global level as well as across domains and value chains. Demonstrators and living labs are essential to alleviate concerns and regulatory and legal issues to ensure a reliable framework. Societal dialogue and awareness-raising as well as ethics are crucial elements of future CPS development. Further recommendations include focusing EC incentives on open approaches.
Regarding the application perspective, five domains (smart city, manufacturing, energy, transport and health) have been analysed for their specific needs and barriers for successful CPS deployment. Many similarities, especially for the underlying technologies, but also domain specific differences could be observed. Main barriers include missing interoperability, integration and standards, the fragmentation of initiatives and across application domains and missing skills. A major showstopper, next to high implementation costs and missing demonstrations are concerns regarding security, privacy, and confidentiality. Business related barriers include missing business models, missing openness (open data) and vendor lock, missing legal frameworks, regulation, IPR protection, liability and concerns regarding multiple ownership. Conservatism and resistance to change in some sectors and countries are barriers together with difficult access especially for SMEs. Moreover, social acceptance and awareness need to be ensured and ethical concerns need to be overcome.
Road2CPS recommendations and innovation strategies target catalysing progress in key technological and non-technological fields, broadening their applications and enabling new business, following a cross-disciplinary, multi-domain and inclusive approach, to best benefit economy and society as a whole. Building an ecosystem to bring relevant stakeholders together, creating a mind-set open to innovation and fostering investment in a focussed way, is seen as key for a successful path towards the future.

Final results

Next to supporting industry, academia and policy making to better understand and make use of CPS results, and providing European organisations with the direction required to establish their future vision, the Road2CPS future RD&I and strategic priorities ideally feed into the EC’s Work Programme 2018-2020 and beyond. Road2CPS results have already been of relevance for the ECs strategy discussions and were included in the EC’s Communication on Digitising European Industry (DEI) (COM (2016)180 final), as well as discussed in the DEIs working groups (Digital Innovation Hubs; Platforms). Road2CPS served as a link between the ICT-1 projects (ICT-1-2014 and 2016) and brought the ICT-1 and ARTEMIS community together (SmartCPS event within the ARTEMIS spring event 2016), as well as the CPS, IoT (Internet of Things), FoF (Factories of the Future) and HiPEAC communities, resulting in a very fruitful discussions and alignment of activities and perspectives. Moreover, Road2CPS performed activities bringing supply and demand as well as stakeholders across the value chains together. From all activities, the Road2CPS consortium has derived comprehensive recommendations for the EC as well as for the community. The consortium believes that Road2CPS results are of high relevance not only for the better deployment but also societal acceptance of CPS.

Website & more info

More info: http://www.road2cps.eu/.