The aim of the project is to collaboratively address a common innovation support challenge; namely to improve the use of public funds for R&D&I enabling synergies between ESIF, H2020 and other funds. Intermediary organizations offering support services on funding opportunities to SMEs are relevant actors in this process from two main points of view: 1) they can help policy makers in the development and application of the synergies, 2) they can support SMEs in the correct use of public funds for R&D. The Peer learning activity will serve to learn from the best and to share good and bad practices in funding opportunities support services. The realized Design Option Paper will serve as a “guide” or a “handbook” to other agencies and business support centres to provide similar and/or more focused services on funding opportunities support.

Drones can perform air operations that manned aircrafts struggle with, and their use brings significant economic savings and environmental benefits whilst reducing the risk to human life. Drone-based service and product innovation, as driven by increased levels of connectivity and automation, is limited by the growing dependence on poorly interoperable proprietary technologies and the risks posed to people, to other vehicles and to property. SESAR JU identified that issue has a high impact on European innovation, which demands R&D investments and incentives for the convergence of shared technologies and markets as a remedy. Actions creating globally harmonized, commercially exploitable yet widely accessible R&D ecosystems should be publicly performed. The COMP4DRONES project complements SESAR JU efforts with a particular focus on safe software and hardware drone architectures. COMP4DRONES will bear a holistically designed ecosystem ranging from application to electronic components, realized as a tightly integrated multi-vendor and compositional drone embedded architecture solution and a tool chain complementing the compositional architecture principles. The ecosystem aims at supporting (1) efficient customization and incremental assurance of drone embedded platforms, (2) safe autonomous decision making concerning individual or cooperative missions, (3) trustworthy drone-to-drone and drone-to-ground communications even in presence of malicious attackers and under the intrinsic platform constraints, and (4) agile and cost-effective compositional design and assurance of drone modules and systems. COMP4DRONES will also build an open sustainable ecosystem around public, royalty-free and goal-driven software platform standards that will ease the development of new drone functionalities for multiple application domains. Lead applications driving ecosystem development and benchmarking on the fields of transport, inspection, logistic, precision agriculture, parcel delivery.

For the purpose of creating digitalisation and automation solutions Arrowhead Tools adresses engineering methodologies and suitable integrated tool chains. With the global aim of substantial reduction of the engineering costs for digitalisation/automation solutions. Thus the Arrowhead Tools vision is: - Engineering processes and tool chains for cost efficient developments of digitalization, connectivity and automation systems solutions in various fields of application For the further and wider commercialisation of automation and digitalisation services and products based on SOA, Arrowhead Framework and similar technologies there is a clear need for engineerings tools that integrates existing automation and digitalisation engineering procedures and tool with SOA based automation/digitalisation technology. For this purpose the Arrowhead Tool’s grand challenges are defined as: - Engineering costs reduction by 40-60% for a wide range of automation/digitalisation solutions. - Tools chains for digitalisation and automation engineering and management, adapted to: 1. existing automation and digitalisation engineering methodologies and tools 2. new IoT and SoS automation and digitalisation engineering and management tools 3. security management tools - Training material and kits for professional engineers The results will create impact on: - Automation and digitalisation solution market - Automation and engineering efficiency and the SSBS market - Automation and digitalisation security - Competence development on engineering of automation and digitalisation solution

PRELUDE will facilitate the transition to clean energy by combining innovative, smart, low-cost solutions into a proactive optimization service. The project is focused on assessing the right level of smartness necessary for any given household and then providing the optimal tools according to the needs of the user (occupant or tenant, owner or manager and energy service provider). It is designed to be versatile and adapt to the engagement level and monitoring and automation level of the building, motivating them to invest by increasing engagement and the smartness of the household. Passive solutions, such as natural ventilation and cooling will be prioritized through a free running strategy to reduce the energy consumption of mechanical HVAC. Predictive maintenance will be implemented to reduce maintenance and repair costs, emphasizing RES. Big data and advanced analytic tools will be used to facilitate flexible building-side demand and ease the integration into district heating and electricity grids. Proactive optimization will be achieved through data predictive control. These components will be interfaced through cloud middleware to deliver a highly interchangeable and interoperable solution. PRELUDE is designed as an optimization service, providing clear and pertinent feedback and suggesting retrofitting actions on a cost-efficient basis through dynamic building renovation passports. The project’s innovations will be demonstrated in a wide spectrum of applications: individual multi-apartment buildings in Turin and Geneva, large scale residential in Krakow, social housing in Athens, detached modern nZEBs in Denmark and on a district scale in the Municipality of Aalborg. Each of these cases featuring unique challenges and benefits for the users. PRELUDE will achieve energy savings exceeding 35% by leveraging both occupant and building operations. Similarly, maintenance and repair costs will be reduced by over 39%.

The cloud computing industry has grown massively over the last decade and with that new areas of application have arisen. Some areas require specialized hardware, which needs to be placed in locations close to the user. User requirements such as ultra-low latency, security and location awareness are becoming more and more common, for example, in Smart Cities, industrial automation and data analytics. Modern cloud applications have also become more complex as they usually run on a distributed computer system, split up into components that must run with high availability. Unifying such diverse systems into centrally controlled compute clusters and providing sophisticated scheduling decisions across them are two major challenges in this field. Scheduling decisions for a cluster consisting of cloud and edge nodes must consider unique characteristics such as variability in node and network capacity. The common solution for orchestrating large clusters is Kubernetes, however, it is designed for reliable homogeneous clusters. Many applications and extensions are available for Kubernetes. Unfortunately, none of them accounts for optimization of both performance and energy or addresses data and job locality. In DECICE, we develop an open and portable cloud management framework for automatic and adaptive optimization of applications by mapping jobs to the most suitable resources in a heterogeneous system landscape. By utilizing holistic monitoring, we construct a digital twin of the system that reflects on the original system. An AI-scheduler makes decisions on placement of job and data as well as conducting job rescheduling to adjust to system changes. A virtual training environment is provided that generates test data for training of ML-models and the exploration of what-if scenarios. The portable framework is integrated into the Kubernetes ecosystem and validated using relevant use cases on real-world heterogeneous systems.