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.

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

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 are important emerging scenarios 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 must 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 will be validated by two rail transport operators and the results will support the re-design of the final prototype.

The project OPEVA aims for innovation on aggregating information from the vehicle, not only from the battery but also from other internal sensors and behaviours, to create a model of performance and consumption specific to the individual vehicle and its driver (TD1). It aims to optimize the individual driving episode using the out-vehicle data such as state of the road, weather, charging station location and occupancy etc. that are collated from the back-end systems (TD2). OPEVA will further address the challenges associated with the communication between the vehicle and the infrastructure to gather data from the back-end systems (TD3). It aims for innovation in the use of recharging stations and related applications (TD4). It further aims to achieve better understanding on what the battery and its constituent cells are really doing during real world use for an improved battery management system (TD5). Finally, TD6 covers the driver-oriented human factors for optimizing the electrical vehicle usage. The TDs from the most deeply embedded in the vehicle to its support in the cloud, which need to interwork in an optimal fashion to deliver in one decade a better level of systemic optimisation for personal mobility that took ten decades to achieve with fossil fuels. On the other hand, economic factors (N-TD1), legal and ethical aspects (N-TD2), EV related development by the human (N-TD3), and societal and environmental factors (N-TD4) will be taken into consideration in the OPEVA methods for a higher acceptance and the awareness of the society regarding the these developments.