The lack of interoperability is considered as the most important barrier to achieve the global integration of IoT ecosystems across borders of different disciplines, vendors and standards. Indeed, the current IoT landscape consists of a large set of isolated islands that do not constitute a real internet, preventing the exploitation of the huge potential expected by ICT visionaries. To overcome this situation, VICINITY presents a virtual neighborhood concept, which is a decentralized, bottom-up and cross-domain approach that resembles a social network, where users can configure their set ups, integrate standards according to the services they want to use and fully control their desired level of privacy. VICINITY then automatically creates technical interoperability up to the semantic level. This allows users without technical background to get connected to the vicinity ecosystem in an easy and open way, fulfilling the consumers needs. Furthermore, the combination of services from different domains together with privacy-respectful user-defined share of information, enables synergies among services from those domains and opens the door to a new market of domain-crossing services. VICINITY's approach will be demonstrated by a large-scale demonstration connecting 8 facilities in 7 different countries. The demonstration covers various domains including energy, building automation, health and transport. VICINITY's potential to create new, domain-crossing services will be demonstrated by value added services such as micro-trading of DSM capabilities, AI-driven optimization of smart urban districts and business intelligence over IoT. Open calls are envisioned in the project to integrate further, preferably public, IoT infrastructures and to deploy additional added value services. This will not only extend the scale of VICINITY demonstration, but also efficiently raise the awareness of industrial communities of VICINITY and its capabilities.

GIFT is an innovative project that aims to decarbonise the energy mix of European islands. European islands have to abide by the law of their countries that push toward a greener energy mix to comply with the European and international agreements. GIFT is willing to develop innovative systems to allow islands to integrate vast amount of renewables. In order to reach that goal, the coordinator INEA has built a well-balanced consortium gathering a total of 17 partners of 7 countries, including 1 industrial partner, 9 SMEs, two municipalities, 3 research centres and 2 universities. Through the development of multiple innovative solutions, such as a virtual power system, energy management systems for harbours, factories, homes, better prediction of supply and demand and visualisation of those date through a GIS platform, and innovative storage systems allowing synergy between electrical, heating and transportation networks, GIFT will increase the penetration rate of renewable energy sources into the islands’ grid, reducing their needs for diesel generation and thus decreasing the greenhouse gases emissions directly related to it. During 4 years, the partners will develop and demonstrate the solutions in two lighthouse islands, in Hinnøya, Norway’s largest island and the small island of Procida in Italy and study the replicability of the solution in a Greek and Italian islands at the minimum, respectively Evia and Favignana. The complementarity of these islands in terms of climate, energy mix, population and activities is meant to have solutions adaptable to different situations. To even increase this, the GIFT project has started to build a replication board with associations that already gather 1640 European islands that will be able to study replication for their territories. The consortium aims to provide sustainable solutions with a strong market uptake and plans to widely disseminate their solutions and replicate it on all relevant islands in the EU and beyond.

Τhe strategic objective of SPADE is to develop an Intelligent Ecosystem to address the multiple purposes concept in the light of deploying UAVs to promote sustainable digital services for the benefit of a large scope of various end users in the sectors of agriculture, forestry, and livestock. This includes individual UAV usability, UAV type applicability (e.g., swarm, collaborative, autonomous, tethered), UAV governance models availability and trustworthiness. Multi-purposes will be further determined in the sensing dataspace reusability based on trained AI/Machine Learning (ML) models. These will enable sustainability and resilience of the overall life cycle of developing, setting up, offering, providing, testing, validating, refining as well as enhancing digital transformations and ‘innovation building’ services in Forestry, Cropping and Livestock Farming. Pilot prototypes will contribute towards greater challenges such as deforestation, precision cropping and animal welfare. First, SPADE will create a digital platform that is able to realise the potential benefits to be reaped from the use of drones. This platform is making drone operations better accessible and controllable, as well as providing a service channel for value added services enabled by drones. Second, SPADE is demonstrating three innovative use cases of drones making use of the digital platform. While demonstrating the use cases, the benefits coming from the use of drones are analysed and quantified, on a detailed stakeholder level basis. This will demonstrate the new business opportunities. The demonstrations/pilots will also serve as an analysis platform to investigate the regulatory framework at international and national level. Open calls will provide 12 further use cases.

Lower population and business density make it more challenging to develop private businesses and public services in rural areas, negatively impacting socio-economic indicators. Rural areas are key to solve climate change, food, biomass and energy challenges. Favourable climate for entrepreneurship is needed for better provision of jobs, basic services, including health and care, connectivity, smart transport, energy solutions and attractiveness as whole, overcoming digital divide between rural and urban areas. AURORAL focus on delivering a digital environment of interoperable services through platforms able to trigger dynamic rural ecosystems of innovation chains, applications and services. Thus, AURORAL contributes to increasing economic growth in rural areas and to tackle significant societal challenges. AURORAL digital environment is demonstrated by cost-efficient and flexible cross-domain applications through large-scale pilots in five European regions. AURORAL digital environment builds on an open, API-based, interoperable and federated IoT architecture and includes a reference implementation supporting flexible integration of heterogeneous services, bridging the interoperability gap of the smart object platforms and creating markets for services in rural areas. AURORAL digital environment addresses the integration of data and information across different platforms, establishment of an open market place, large-scale demonstration, multiplication of novel applications, the leverage of infrastructure and inclusion of public services. AURORAL pilots follow an evolutionary agile, well-delineated, and lean approach demonstrated in large-scale applications capable of meeting social and economic objectives critical to boost new rural services and business. AURORAL digital environment supports a vibrant ecosystem of developers, service providers and user communities and addresses barriers currently opposing the socio-economic development of rural areas.