The objective of the project ‘PRoPART’ is the development and demonstration of a high availability positioning solution for connected automated driving applications. It aims to develop and enhance an existing RTK (Real Time Kinematic) software solution developed by Flowscape, by exploiting the distinguished features of Galileo signals as well as combining it with other positioning and sensor technologies. Besides the use of vehicle on board sensors, ‘PRoPART’ will also use a low-cost Ultra Wideband (UWB) ranging solution for redundancy and robustness in areas where the coverage of GNSS is poor e.g. in tunnels or in urban canyons. In order to define the correct requirements for the PRoPART combined positioning solution, a cooperative automated vehicle application will be defined and developed. The vehicle application will rely on the high availability positioning solution and use it to couple its ADAS system with V2X and aggregate information received from other connected vehicles and Road Side Units (RSU). As there will be a transition period where a lot of vehicles are neither connected nor automated, solutions having high impact during low penetration are in focus. Therefore ‘PRoPART’ will implement an RSU with high precision positioning and use both UWB as well as a traffic monitoring to supply ranging, object perception and EGNSS RTK correction data via ETSI ITS-G5 to the connected automated vehicle so it can make safe decisions based on robust data. This means that ‘PRoPART’ also will implement perception layer sensor fusion that uses information collected in the LDM (Local Dynamic Map) as well as information from both the on board vehicle sensors and the high availability positioning solution. We will also exploit possibilities to distribute EGNSS RTK correction data from the RSU to the vehicle.

The assurance of security, privacy, reliability and safety features is key-point to unlock the enormous potential that the connected vehicles systems paradigm i.e., the dynamic Cyberphysical system of highly-equipped infrastructure-connected vehicles with numerous third-party components, can offer towards safer transportation. The emerging systems expose a variety of wireless-communication and hardware interfaces which result in a large attack surface; thus, attempts to assess the degree of confidence that security needs are satisfied come with prohibited cost for automotive stakeholders and OEMs. SAFERtec project will leverage a highly-skilled consortium to first model the varying exposure of a prototype connected vehicle system to numerous threats appearing under two generic instances of the increasingly pervasive V2I setting. One relates to road-side unit communication while the other involves the interaction with cloud application and passengers' smart devices. Then, adopting a systematic vertical approach SAFERtec will obtain an in-depth look of the possible vulnerabilities performing penetration-testing on individual hardware components and upper-layer V2I applications. Considering the available security mechanisms a third party provider already applies to each module, SAFERtec will determine a corresponding protection profile as a summary of the identified risks. An innovative framework appropriately designed for unified and thus, cost-effective use across all modules will employ statistical tools and security metrics to quantify the involved security assurance levels and also feed the incomplete automotive standards. Research on dependability methods will then allow the framework's transition from individual modules to the connected vehicle system. All above results will be incorporated and made available through an open-access toolkit that will pave the way towards the cost-effective identification of security assurance levels for connected vehicle systems.

Ever since the cloud-centric service provision started becoming incapable for efficiently supporting the emerging end-user needs, compute functionality has been shifted from the cloud, closer to the edge, or delegated to the user equipment at the far-edge. The resources and computing capabilities residing at those locations have been lately considered to collectively make-up a ‘compute continuum’, albeit its unproven assurance to securely accommodate end-to-end information sharing. The continuum-deployed workloads generate traffic that steers through untrusted HW and SW infrastructure (domains) of continuously changing trust-states. CASTOR develops and evaluates technologies to enable trustworthy continuum-wide communications. It departs from the processing of user-expressed high-level requirements for a continuum service, which are turned-to combinations of security needs and network resource requirements, referred to as CASTOR policies. The policies are subsequently enforced on the continuum HW and SW infrastructure to realise an optimised, trusted communication path delivering innovation-breakthroughs to the so-far unsatisfied need: a) for distributed (composable) attestation of the continuum nodes and subsequent elevation of individual outcomes to an adaptive (to changes) continuum trust quantification; b) for the derivation of the optimal path as a joint computation of the continuum trust properties and resources; c) for continuum infrastructure vendor-agnostic trusted path establishment, seamlessly crossing different administrative domains. The CASTOR will be evaluated in operational environments of 4 use-cases whereby varying types of security/safety-critical information is shared. Project innovations will be exhaustively assessed in 3 diverse application domains utilising the carefully-designed CASTOR testbed core for each case. Our results will provide experimental evidence for the CASTOR's efficiency and feed the incomplete trust-relevant (IETF) standards.

Over the past few years, there is one person killed and close to one seriously injured every day on level crossings. Therefore SAFER-LC aims to improve safety and minimize risk by developing a fully-integrated cross-modal set of innovative solutions and tools for the proactive management and design of level-crossing infrastructure. These tools will enable road and rail decision makers to find even more effective ways to detect potentially dangerous situations leading to collisions at level crossings, prevent incidents at level crossing by innovative design and predictive maintenance methods, and mitigate the consequences of incidents/disruptions due to accidents or other critical events. The project will focus both on technical solutions, such as smart detection services and advanced infrastructure-to-vehicle communication systems and on human processes to adapt infrastructure design to end-users and to enhance coordination and cooperation between different stakeholders from different transportation modes. The project will first identify the needs and requirements of rail-road infrastructure managers and LC users and then seek to develop innovative smart detection and communication systems and adapt them for use by all types of level crossing users. A series of pilot tests across Europe will be rolled out to demonstrate how these new technological and non-technological solutions can be integrated, validate their feasibility and evaluate their performance. The project will deliver a bundle of recommended technical specifications (for standardisation), human processes and organizational and legal frameworks for implementation. SAFER-LC will also develop a toolbox accessible through a user-friendly interface which will integrate all the project results and solutions to help both rail and road managers to improve safety at level crossings.

5G adv. and 6G aim to expand the set of supported verticals and provide enhanced capabilities beyond connectivity. 5G CAM vertical services are a broad range of services in and around vehicles, including both safety-related and other services enabled or supported by 5G. 5GS has been built as a modular architecture to support any vertical running on top in a vertical-agnostic manner. However, it is realized that certain verticals (like CAM) have specific and strict requirements. Although significant progress has been made in supporting verticals, the corresponding necessary configuration of the network and end-devices is a time-consuming manual process that requires tight coordination at technical and business levels across the verticals, the vendors, the network operator, and even the end-users. This hinders not only the greater adoption of 5GS but also the uptake of novel CAM UCs and the modernization of existing ones that require a tighter integration with the underlying network. The main objective of ENVELOPE is to advance and open up the reference 5G adv. architecture, and also to transform it into a vertical-oriented with the necessary interfaces tailored to the CAM UCs that i) expose network capabilities to verticals, ii) provide vertical-information to the network; iii) enable verticals to dynamically request and modify certain network aspects in an open, transparent and easy to use, semi-automated way. ENVELOPE aims to deliver 3 large-scale B5G trial sites in Italy, Netherlands and Greece for CAM services and beyond, implementing functionalities tailored to the CAM services and advanced exposure capabilities. Although focused on the CAM vertical, the resulting developments will be reusable by any vertical. The ENVELOPE architecture will serve as an envelope that can cover, accommodate and support any type of vertical services. The applicability of ENVELOPE capabilities will be demonstrated via the project CAM UCs and via at least 9 open call projects.