Recommendations for research priorities and innovation strategies
Creators: name: Pfeifer, Holgar
name: Thompson, Haydn
name: Reimann, Meike
name: Ramos-Hernandez, Daniela
name: Bageritz, Steve
name: Brunet, Adrien
name: Robinson, Charles
name: Sautter, Björn
name: Linzbach, Johannes
name: Pfeifer, Holger
name: Aravantinos, Vincent
name: Törngren, Martin
name: Asplund, Fredrik
name: Zhang, Xinhai
name: De Sutter, Isabelle
Publisher: name: Zenodo
Year: 2018

description: This report presents the Platforms4CPS recommendations regarding research and innovation. In the context of Platforms4CPS, research is considered as the creation and testing of new concepts and innovation is about bringing these ideas successfully to the market. The recommendations are the result of various activities that the Platform4CPS consortium has carried out over the project lifetime. These activities included in-depth analyses of all areas that are key to the successful uptake of CPS technology in innovative applications. This starts from the need for a better understanding of the scientific foundations of CPS Engineering, to analysing CPS domains and corresponding research roadmaps to develop consensus about specific areas where research is needed with high priority. Furthermore the project looked at existing European innovation support mechanisms and analysed the market landscapes in important CPS domains to identify opportunities and challenges in CPS for businesses.
Based on this, one of the main pillars of the project work was to devise a set of key recommendations for the European Commission for actions needed to address the fundamental scientific challenges in the main priority areas of CPS research, and to remove barriers to innovation and uptake of CPS technology towards societal-scale CPS that are safe, secure, and can be trusted. Overall, Platforms4CPS has identified recommendations in four key areas:
- Research priorities
- Supporting innovation needs
- Societal and legal issues that need addressing
- Strategic business support
Among the key needs for the future identified by Platforms4CPS is to tackle the fragmentation of efforts, both in terms of research programmes that need better alignment, and at the level of eco-systems to enhance cross-domain collaboration. There is a strong need for European coordination in order to establish a "Science for CPS", embracing methods, formalisms, and standards from multiple disciplines in order to increase interoperability of solutions and platforms, and foster cross-fertilisation in both the application and the engineering domains. The digital capacity and capability of businesses and particularly SMEs needs to be increased through Digital Innovation Hubs, which also need to provide help to SMEs in allaying fears that are significant barriers to adoption, such as risks around cyber-security. The digital skills shortage needs to be addressed, particularly in digital engineering capabilities and encourage systematic engagement between education and industry to encourage life-long learning and re-skilling to avoid a future digital divide.
The recommendations are grouped into short-term and longer-term actions, where the shorter term needs can begin to be addressed under Horizon 2020 and existing Digitising European Industry activities, while further in the future the recommendations address Horizon Europe linking with developing ideas within the Commission such as the Edge 2030 vision.
The short term recommendations address strengthening and broadening existing activities around Digital Innovation Hubs, such as in initiatives like I4MS (Innovation for Manufacturing SMEs - FoF) and SAE (Smart Anything Everywhere - ICT), to address the strong need to engage with SMEs and support innovation and transfer of technology to SMEs. Furthermore, the adoption of European platforms and federation between existing platforms is seen as key for European industry and for accelerating the uptake of CPS implementation. To accelerate the uptake of new platforms with the SME ecosystem it is recommended that further showcase experiments and large-scale pilots are funded to bring together key actors and critical mass. In addition, new regulatory frameworks need to be supported to provide guidance to industry and remove barriers to innovation particularly with regard to the exploitation of data, which is seen as a strong driver in the future. In particular within the CPS domain the areas of AI and autonomous systems are rapidly developing and it is expected that these will be key in the future. To support these areas there is a need for regulation to address liability issues.
In the longer term, from 2020 onwards, research and innovation activities will be supported by the new Framework Programme Horizon Europe. There are a number of emerging themes that have been identified within Platforms4CPS expert workshops, including "autonomous systems", "Artificial Intelligence" and "trust" that were clearly highlighted as key themes for the future. Autonomous system will increasingly rely on data processing at the edge to guarantee the needed safety, latency and predictability requirements, and to address privacy and security concerns. Platforms4CPS recommends to support edge computing with funding for necessary enabling technologies such as low power processing, high performance computing and new computing techniques, such as neuromorphic computing. Concerning AI and Autonomous Systems, there is a need for understandable, accountable autonomous systems, which act ethically. In addition to a concerted action to master AI at a European level and support for AI developments in key sectors, a programme is required to encourage the business adoption of AI technologies to solve problems and deliver practical business value. Finally, in order to build trustable systems there is a need to maintain sovereignty of key value chains.
A key challenge identified by CPS experts was how to manage complexity at both the design stage and in the operation of systems to provide trustworthy systems for the future. Engineers need to deal with many heterogeneous components and also complex interactions with humans. This requires new approaches to Systems Engineering that can deal with decomposition into components to manage complexity and new or improved CPS engineering approaches. The grand challenge of developing societal-scale cognitive CPS that we can trust relies on the development of solid scientific foundation for a "Science of CPS". The recommended way to approach this is to establish a dedicated institution with the mission to define and coordinate European efforts in science, engineering and education for CPS, akin to a "CERN for CPS". This organisation can unite and boost CPS research and development across Europe, bringing together the leading CPS scientists and research institutions from all across Europe, employing a multi-disciplinary team of researchers and engineers, in order to drive the development of a Science for CPS. The centre would be a central anchoring point connecting with decentralised existing initiatives and infrastructures all over Europe.