Smart Cyber-Physical Systems

Topic description

Specific Challenge:

The importance of the areas of the often time- and safety-critical embedded and cyber-physical systems (CPS) will continue to grow with the increasing pervasiveness of ICT and the development of the Internet of Things. The challenge is to design, programme and implement highly distributed and connected digital technologies that are embedded in a multitude of increasingly autonomous physical systems with various dynamics and satisfying multiple critical constraints including safety, security, power efficiency, high performance, size and cost. Such combination of several cyber-physical systems in "system of systems" gives rise to unpredictable behaviour and emergent properties. A significant improvement in design and programming of CPS is therefore needed including a "science of system integration".

a. Research and Innovation Actions - Science of system integration: Research and Innovation projects should address new model-centric and predictive engineering methods and tools for cyber-physical systems and systems of systems with a high degree of autonomy ensuring adaptability, scalability, complexity management, security and safety, and providing trust to humans in the loop. Work should be driven by industrial needs and validated in at least two use cases complementing each other in different application domains and sectors. Results should be integrated into broader development environments and middleware. The centre of gravity of the work should be on TRLs 1-4, with demonstrations up to level 5.

The Commission considers that proposals requesting a contribution from the EU up to EUR 5 million would allow this area to be addressed appropriately. Nonetheless, this does not preclude submission and selection of proposals requesting other amounts.

b. Coordination and Support Actions for structuring of constituencies, strategically updating and validating CPS roadmaps, cooperating with other European programmes such as ECSEL and ITEA on the foundations of CPS engineering, promoting platform building and pre-normative activities (such as a repository of CPS technology blocks) and consensus-building on societal and legal issues related to the deployment of CPS.

Proposals are expected to bring together leading CPS experts from academia and industry to collaborate on future CPS architectures and platforms.

The Commission considers that proposals requesting a contribution from the EU up to EUR 1 million would allow this area to be addressed appropriately. Nonetheless, this does not preclude submission and selection of proposals requesting other amounts.

Proposals should address one or more of the following impact criteria, providing metrics to measure success when appropriate.

• Extension of, and/or performance improvement in the supply of CPS methods and tools targeting specific industrial markets;
• Demonstrable advances in CPS engineering to reduce significantly development time and cost of ownership;
• Contribution to interoperability activities (e.g. repositories of models, interface specifications or reference architectures/platforms/patterns).