Increasing Europe’s competitiveness in cloud-edge IoT platform solutions with Large Scale Pilots
Imagine manufacturing enterprises where real-time data analytics predict equipment failures before they occur.
As the EU builds highly automated manufacturing plants requiring low latency and significant data volumes steered by AI, edge computing for industrial applications could better enable performance and reduce latency for industrial connected robotics, keeping data transfers more secure.
Building on the foundational efforts of the EUCloudEdgeIoT initiative started in 2022, the EU has recently funded new projects under the Horizon Europe programme, dedicated to increasing innovation and collaboration in the CEI continuum.
“The investment in the CEI LSPs presents a massive market opportunity. The future competitiveness of European industry and the mass adoption of AI-driven solutions that are responsible for decarbonising our energy through flexibility and transforming our manufacturing models rely on a strong, secure and diverse digital CEI ecosystem. This can only be achieved by delivering market value and making an unavoidable investment case for companies to build on the EU CEI.” – Tanya Suárez | CEI-Sphere Coordinator
The Large-Scale Pilots
Supported by the Coordination and Support Action CEI-Sphere, two major CEI Large Scale Pilots (LSPs) have been funded: O-CEI and COP-PILOT.
The O-CEI project brings together 58 partners from 20 countries and aims to develop an open, interoperable, and sustainable platform, addressing key challenges in decentralised CEI networks, such as rising energy consumption, costs and carbon emissions. Backed by over 20M€ of EU funding, O-CEI aims to imprint innovation in digital technologies across sectors relying on renewable energy sources in alignment with EU Strategies.
COP-PILOT and its consortium of 45 partners will create a Collaborative Open Platform (COP) that is standards-aligned and market-oriented, enabling end-to-end orchestration across service domains.
CEI-Sphere works with the LSPs and European industry players to translate use cases into business models, promoting replicability and scalability of the developed solutions. It supports the LSPs by mapping pilots and actors, developing a use-case catalogue, promoting interoperability through a defined Minimum Interoperability Mechanisms (MiMs) approach. It also supports the development of secure and compliant CEI systems.