title: CPS Community Roadmap Report
title: D 2.2
titleType: Other
Creators: name: Reimann, Meike
name: Thompson, Haydn
name: Toerngren, Martin
name: Pfeifer, Holgar
name: Robinson, Charles
Publisher: name: Zenodo
Year: 2018

description: The Platforms4CPS 'CPS Community Roadmap Report' summarises the findings of the projects comparative roadmap analysis and complementing 'Roadmap Consensus Workshops', deriving a common view on future research priorities, barriers and enablers as well as recommendations for CPS related development and deployment activities. The aim of the document is to give an overview on the results and perspectives of recent and ongoing CPS-related roadmaps, analyse converging visions and to obtain consensus between main stakeholders in terms of required future actions across Europe.
Various roadmaps, vision and strategy documents have been analysed in the field of Digitising the European Industry mainly in Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS), Cyber-Physical System of Systems (CPSoS), Embedded Components and Systems (ECS), Advanced Computing, and Factories of the Future (FoF). Moreover, the respective representatives of these documents were involved in different workshops to discuss visions and priorities and draw recommendations for future research and innovation.
Amongst the technological topics, and related future research priorities, integration, interoperability and standards ranked very highly. A topic connected to digital platforms and reference architectures, which have already become a key priority theme for the EC and their Digitisation Strategy. Another theme of very high relevance revealed to be autonomous CPS in connection with robotics and edge computing. This also features strongly in the EC 2030 vision for the upcoming Horizon Europe Framework Program. Important underlying technological themes are situational awareness, improved forecasting, decision-making, Artificial Intelligence and learning. Key to the future will be safety and security of such systems. This engenders trust, which will be crucial to the uptake of new autonomous technologies. The human-in-the-loop was also identified as being a key future challenge that will need to be solved by new CPS engineering approaches suitable for the ever-growing complexity in evolving systems.
In summary, consensus research priority themes across various roadmaps included:
- Data analytics and (collaborative) decision support
- Trustable AI-enabled autonomous CPS, cognitive systems and situation awareness
- Human in the loop, HMI, intuitive systems, wearables, virtual and augmented reality
- CPS (virtual) engineering of large, complex systems including modelling & simulation
- CPS reference architectures and standards
- Agile, open, vertical and horizontal, federated, (dynamic) plug-and-play CPS platforms
- Integration, (semantic) interoperability, flexibility, composability and reconfiguration
- Seamless connectivity, edge computing, intelligent edge devices, energy efficiency
- Safety, reliability & (cyber)security, privacy and trust
Main barriers to overcome are difficulties regarding the integration of legacy systems, missing interoperability and standards, the fragmentation of initiatives and across application domains and missing skills (knowledge, competences, IT-education, interdisciplinarity). Mastering complexity, terminology, semantics and overcoming concerns regarding safety and stability will be crucial for the success of future CPSs. A major hurdle, next to high implementation costs and missing demonstration, are concerns regarding security, privacy and confidentiality of such systems. Business related barriers include missing business models, missing openness (open data) and fear of vendor lock. Supporting legal frameworks, regulation, certification, IPR protection, liability, are also not yet in place. Conservatism, resistance to change and missing entrepreneurial thinking are additional barriers. Access to technologies and infrastructures is seen as difficult, especially for SMEs and start-ups.
Critically, user acceptance and trust need to be ensured and ethical concerns overcome. Without a deep and critical dialogue, positive vision and mindful path to implement such pervasive and partially autonomous systems, societal concerns might become the main showstopper to CPS deployment.
Innovation accelerators, needed for successful implementation were particularly pointed out to be multi-disciplinarity and cross-fertilising approaches as well as coordinated collaboration to reduce fragmentation across the EU. Education (T-shape, lifelong learning and reskilling) and CPS enabled business models and services were seen as very important. Demonstrators and living lab are considered as essential to alleviate concerns and regulatory, legal and ethical issues to ensure a reliable framework. Not only societal dialogue and awareness raising but also real user acceptance and trust appeared as crucial elements of future CPS success. Further points included to focus EC incentives on open source solutions and open approaches related to data, platform building and innovations.
In summary, important priorities to support successful CPS implementation were highlighted to be:
- Collaboration across initiatives, engineering / application domains, international collaboration
- Access of SMEs, start-ups and scale-ups to the ecosystem
- Openness, open data, open innovation and open platforms
- Demonstration, pilot lines and living labs
- CPS enabled business models and business services
- CPS standardisation, regulation, liability, privacy and ethics
- T-shape, cross-disciplinary education, lifelong learning and (re/up)skilling
- Raise awareness, promote societal dialogue, enhance user acceptance and trust
- Create a positive vision and respective plan for CPS developments and implementation
Regarding the technology trends and new/emerging themes, 'autonomous systems' became very prominent in connection with 'Artificial Intelligence' and 'trust'. New or improved (virtual) CPS engineering approaches to manage the more and more complex systems including the human as a part of the system, but also co-engineered safety and security as a part of it were discussed intensively. Agile (open source) platforms as well as the federation of platforms also ranged high amongst the future challenges. In terms of societal and economic trends IT-systems tend to become 'addictive', with an enhanced dependence of society on these, but at the same time an increasing vulnerability. A positive vision of the 'digitised new world' to follow is still missing. Openness, open data and open innovation became more prominent topics over the last years. Business models become more decoupled from ownership, and topics like servitisation, data driven economy, crowd funding, blockchain are arising. T-shape (broad and deep) education and lifelong learning is crucial for competitiveness and will become a focus also to avoid the digital divide.
Platforms4CPS recommends that Europe should enhance activities to master 'trustworthy CPS for AI (artificial intelligence) enabled autonomous systems with humans in the loop', exploit 'CPS edge computing' and 'co-engineering of CPS system attributes' and provide 'trust' as well as maintaining sovereignty in key value chains. Platforms4CPS emphasises, that research activities have to be embedded into a suitable innovation environment and answering real societal needs.
The Platforms4CPS community recommendations target to catalyse progress in key technological and non-tech fields, following a cross-disciplinary, multi-domain and inclusive approach, and to build and bond an ecosystem brining relevant stakeholders together to speak with one voice.