Irregular and unaccountable transactions, cyber threats, non-user-friendly inefficient or impractical banking processes, complex contracting procedures and cumbersome financial market and insurance infrastructures constitute obstacles to European open market development. CRITICAL-CHAINS delivers a novel triangular accountability model and integrated framework supporting accountable, effective, accessible, fast, secure and privacy-preserving financial contracts and transactions to protect against illicit tranasctions, illegal money trafficking and fraud on FinTech e-operations. This is an innovative cloud-based “X-as-a Service” solution stack including several layers: 1) Data integrity checking by involving financial institutions in the distributed Blockchain network; 2) Transaction and financial data flows analytrics, modelling and mining; 3) Threat Intelligence & Predictive Modelling for Inter-Banks and Internet Banking, insurnace and financial market infrastructures; 4) Multilateral Biometric-based and Role-based Authorisation & Authentication; 5) Hardware Security Module (HSM) enabled Cyber-Physical Security, embedded systems & IoT security for secure access using Security-Privacy-Contexts Semantic Modelling; 6) Secure and smart use of Blockchain based on keyless signature infrastructure and hybrid (a)symmetric cryptography utilising truly random key generation. CRITICAL-CHAINS is to be validated within 4 case studies aligned with 3 critical sectors: banking, financial market infrastructures and the insurance sector. This will evaluate system reliability, usability, user-acceptance, social, privacy, ethical, environmental and legal compliance by scrutiny of the geo-political and legal framework bridging the European economy with the rest of the world. The Consortium respresents a strong chemistry of relevant expertise and an inclusive set of stakeholders comprising end-users (customers), CERTS, the financial sector (Banks & CCPs) and the Insurance sector

Manufacturers of automated systems and the manufacturers of the components used in these systems have been allocating an enormous amount of time and effort in the past years developing and conducting research on automated systems. The effort spent has resulted in the availability of prototypes demonstrating new capabilities as well as the introduction of such systems to the market within different domains. Manufacturers of these systems need to make sure that the systems function in the intended way and according to specifications which is not a trivial task as system complexity rises dramatically the more integrated and interconnected these systems become with the addition of automated functionality and features to them. With rising complexity, unknown emerging properties of the system may come to the surface making it necessary to conduct thorough verification and validation (V&V) of these systems. VALU3S aims to design, implement and evaluate state-of-the-art V&V methods and tools in order to reduce the time and cost needed to verify and validate automated systems with respect to safety, cybersecurity and privacy (SCP) requirements. This will ensure that European manufacturers of automated systems remain competitive and that they remain world leaders. To this end, a multi-domain framework is designed and evaluated with the aim to create a clear structure around the components and elements needed to conduct V&V process through identification and classification of evaluation methods, tools, environments and concepts that are needed to verify and validate automated systems with respect to SCP requirements. The implemented V&V methods as well as improved process workflows and tools will also be evaluated in the project using a comprehensive set of demonstrators built from 13 use cases with specific SCP requirements from 6 domains of automotive, industrial robotics, agriculture, Aerospace, railway and health.

Mobility electrification plays a critical role in the economy decarbonisation, and we are on the edge of an industrial revolution linked to the massive deployment of the electric vehicle (EV). Their technologies readiness level has significantly increased, and the EV can now replace the thermal vehicle in terms of service provided, supporting the EU decarbonisation effort. Besides the reduction of critical material, and decrease of cost, optimising the lifetime of the EV components is essential to ease their adoption, especially the powertrain sub-components that have the major impact on EV cost and CO2 emissions. A new-generation of diagnostic and prognostic systems for the powertrain will be a game changer to ensure EV adoption, because they will estimate its degradation, anticipate failures, and ease reparability thus extending its lifespan. With significant improvement of sensors, complex modelling and data processing methods such as Artificial Intelligence (AI), predictive maintenance (PdM) has gained a lot of interest in different fields. Development of PdM methods for the sub-components of the EV powertrain (battery, fuel cell, e-motor, power electronics) is at the heart of TEAMING. Thanks to international staff exchanges, TEAMING will significantly improve the different facets of the PdM solution: sensors, modelling, Digital Twins, adapted AI, and Physics-Informed Machine Learning methods are at the centre of the studies and present a major potential in term of innovation. TEAMING will advance PdM system to better diagnose the internal physical phenomena of the different EV powertrain components and optimise their performance, lifetime, safety, and reliability.”

Data and AI-driven smart technologies, with an emphasis on (i) the connection between the urban space and the industrial space, (ii) sustainable living and (ii) sustainable industrial production, hold the transformative potential to enhance the sustainability and climate resilience across EU, in private and work spaces. Assuming this, NexTArc is devoted to augmenting the adoption of Trustworthy edge AI and IoT across 3 complementary and interrelated application domains, organised as Use Cases (UC): SLN - Smart, sustainable and Liveable Neighbourhood in Urban Spaces; STI - Smart, sustainable and transparent industrial Spaces; and TEM - Trustworthy and Eco-friendly Multimodal Connectivity of Urban and Industrial Spaces through people and freight mobility, incl. the inter and intra-mobility. Building on this vision, NexTArc aims to promote the cross-fertilization of ideas among a broad spectrum of stakeholders, 38 partners in 10 countries, integrated over a four-fold Innovation Module (IM) approach: i) cyber-resilience on chip; ii) low-power embedded AI; iii) improved computation and dependability covering the high-performance needs; iv) holistic solution stack to enable trustworthy services, which resonate with the EU Chips Act, etc. NexTArc has identified 6 Specific Objectives: 1) Driving adoption of AI while enhancing connectivity preparedness; 2) Targeting a 40% increase in data transmission rates and a 30% reduction in energy use during data processes, while ensuring robust architectural resilience; 3) Fortifying cyber-physical security with an aim for full-compliance with EU’s Chip and Cybersecurity act; 4) Realising open HW/SW to ensure designs that are secure, safe, private, and accountable; 5) Proactively adapting to the dynamic landscape of open-source innovations and key industry standards; 6) Orchestrating 4 IM, unveiling 15 Key Innovations to develop the solutions that are needed for Europe to take the technological lead towards a sustainable society.

Railways and Metros are safe, efficient, reliable and environmentally friendly mass carriers, and they are becoming even more important means of transportation given the need to address climate change. However, being such critical infrastructures turns metro and railway operators as well as related intermodal transport operators into attractive targets for cyber and/or physical attacks. The SAFETY4RAILS project delivers methods and systems to increase the safety and recovery of track-based inter-city railway and intra-city metro transportation. It addresses both cyber-only attacks (such as impact from WannaCry infections), physical-only attacks (such as the Madrid commuter trains bombing in 2014) and combined cyber-physical attacks, which an important emerging scenarios are given increasing IoT infrastructure integration. SAFETY4RAILS concentrates on rush hour rail transport scenarios where many passengers are using metros and railways to commute to work or attend mass events (e.g. large multi-venue sporting events such as the Olympics). When an incident occurs during heavy usage, metro and railway operators have to consider many aspects to ensure passenger safety and security, e.g. carry out a threat analysis, maintain situation awareness, establish crisis communication and response, and they have to ensure that mitigation steps are taken and communicated to travellers and other users. SAFETY4RAILS will improve the handling of such events through a holistic approach. It will analyse the cyber-physical resilience of metro and railway systems and deliver mitigation strategies for an efficient response, and, in order to remain secure given ever-changing novel emerging risks, it will facilitate continuous adaptation of the SAFETY4RAILS solution; this is validated by two rail transport operators and the results supporting the re-design of the final prototype.