Cybersecurity certification as introduced by the EU Cybersecurity Act (EUCSA) will play a crucial role in increasing the trust to and security of ICT Products, ICT Services and ICT Processes. Cybersecurity certification is a complex process, posing a variety of challenges to the different interested parties. This proposal introduces the CUSTODES, a system comprised of a variety of components with the aim to provide trustworthy, cost-effective, agile and portable conformity assessment capabilities, to a variety of interested parties, covering multiple Assurance levels of Composite ICT products or ICT services. The CUSTODES system will discover and translate certification information of the Building Blocks of the composite ICT products or Services under evaluation, will provide Certification information to the interested parties and will share information on newly identified vulnerabilities related to the specific blocks or composite products as needed increasing transparency, re-usability and trust. It will also utilize a Restricted & Trusted Execution (RTE) Environment, to ensure the chain of custody of the product under assessment. CUSTODES will be validated in three pilots, a) one of two Class I composite products with digital elements, b) one of an ICT product with an embedded AI component and c) a final one of the as-a-service functionality through EIT Digital extensive digital ecosystem. The CUSTODES project is built on a collaboration of 17 organisations from 11 EU member states and third countries. The Consortium which includes 3 Conformity Assessment Organizations is composed by 10 SMEs, 3 large industry partners, 2 research organizations, and 2 public organizations/associations. The Consortium is led by RISE which has extensive experience in national and European research projects, and numerous collaborations with industrial partners.

The path towards 6G is beginning now that 5G matured and is being deployed worldwide both publicly and privately. While 5G brought a step up in many fields, such as, performance and efficiency, more is always expected in terms of efficiency by the overall community and in terms of performance by industry and technology providers who want to further increase their offerings and products. Continuous demands for higher throughput, lower latency and more energy efficient communications needs to be supported by relevant use cases that can claim and demonstrate the needs for these requests. 6G-PATH goal is to help foster the further development and integration of new and improved tools and products from EU companies with 5G/6G, while also measuring relevant KPIs and KVIs. To achieve this, 7 testbeds will be part of the project consortium, which will be used by 10 use cases spread across four key verticals: Health, Education, Smart Cities and Farming. Moreover, a relevant portion of the budget will be used for FSTP, where we envision the integration of 2 new Pilot Sites, extend the testbeds with 10 additional technologies, as well as 30 new Use Cases, through Open Calls, to further involve the community and obtain more metrics and outcomes. 6G-PATH plans to work closely with other ongoing/starting Stream-B and Stream-C projects in a feedback loop, where the innovations that partners are achieving in other projects can be deployed and further tested by our pool of use cases and Open Calls, while sharing our results and outcomes to further cement the innovation being made.

5G-TOURS will deploy full end-to-end trials to bring 5G to real users for thirteen representative use cases. The project will provide efficient and reliable close-to-commercial services for tourists, citizens and patients in three different types of cities: (i) Rennes, the safe city where e-health use cases will be demonstrated; (ii) Turin, the touristic city focused on media and broadcast use cases; and (iii) Athens, the mobility-efficient city that brings 5G to users in motion as well as to transport-related service providers. These services will not only improve the quality of life for citizens and tourists, but also represent an important business opportunity as they address industry segments accounting for more than 50% of the estimated revenues generated by verticals. The fundamental feature of the 5G-TOURS concept is the dynamic use of the network to seamlessly provide different types of services adapted to the specific needs of individual use cases. 5G-TOURS will enable different capabilities such as network slicing, virtualisation, orchestration or broadcasting as well as additional features developed by the project to bring more flexibility and improved performance. The ambition is to fully demonstrate pre-commercial 5G technologies at a large scale, showing the ability of the 5G network to meet extreme and conflicting KPIs while supporting very diverse requirements on the same infrastructure. The 5G-TOURS mobile network system will integrate strategic components of the ecosystem, including the network infrastructure, terminals and end-devices, the vertical solutions enabled by 5G, and the vertical customers receiving the services. 5G-TOURS has devised a thorough evaluation plan to scrutinise the viability of the use cases, addressing technical performance by analysing both network service KPIs and application-level KPIs, economic impact by analysing the estimated generated revenues and, ultimately, the satisfaction of the vertical customers.

Healthcare, transport and food verticals are hugely important in Europe, in terms of jobs, size (collectively surpassing €3Trillion) and export trade. Moreover, they are vital from a social perspective, for better patient outcomes, safer transportation and safer and more sustainable food production. 5G is important for these verticals, in terms of improvements for utility, efficient processes, safety among others. 5G-HEART (validation trials) will focus on these vital vertical use-cases of healthcare, transport and aquaculture. In the health area, 5G-HEART will validate pillcams for automatic detection in screening of colon cancer and vital-sign patches with advanced geo-localization as well as 5G AR/VR paramedic services. In the transport area, 5G-HEART will validate autonomous/assisted/remote driving and vehicle data services. Regarding food, focus will be on 5G-based transformation of aquaculture sector (worldwide importance for Norway, Greece, Ireland). The infrastructure shared by the verticals, will host important innovations: slicing as a service; resource orchestration in access/core and cloud/edge segments with live user environments. Novel applications and devices (e.g. underwater drones, car components, healthcare devices) will be devised. Trials will run on sites of 5G-Vinni (Oslo), 5Genesis (Surrey), 5G-EVE (Athens), as well as Oulu and Groningen, which will be integrated to form a powerful and sustainable platform where slice concurrency will be validated at scale. The consortium includes major vertical players, research/academic institutions and SMEs. Partners have proven know-how in 5G, vertical applications, standardisation, business modelling, prototyping, trials, demonstrations. 5G-HEART KPI validation ensures improved healthcare, public safety, farm management and business models in a 5G market, stimulating huge business opportunities within and beyond the project.