Four European TSOs of Central-Eastern Europe (Austria, Hungary, Romania, Slovenia), associated with power system experts, electricity retailers, IT providers and renewable electricity providers, propose to design a unique regional cooperation scheme: it aims at opening Balancing and Redispatching markets to new sources of flexibility and supporting such sources to act on such markets competitively. Thanks to a prototype aggregation solution and renewable generation forecasting techniques, flexibility providers – distributed generators (DG) and Commercial and Industrial (C&I) consumers providing demand response (DR) – are enabled, through retailers acting as flexibility aggregators, to provide competitive offers for Frequency Restoration Reserve (including secondary control activated with a response time between 30 seconds and 15 minutes). A comprehensive techno-economic model for the cross-border integration of such services involves a common activation function (CAF) tailored to congested borders and optimized to overcome critical intra-regional barriers. The resulting CAF is implemented into a prototype Regional Balancing and Redispatching Platform, securely integrated within the four TSOs’ IT systems: this makes research activities about cross-border integration flexible while linking with the aggregation solution. Use cases of growing complexity are pilot tested, going from the involvement of DR and DG into national balancing markets to cross-border competition between flexibility aggregators. Based on past experience with tertiary reserve, participating C&I consumers and DG are expected to provide close to 40MW of secondary reserve. Impact analyses of the pilot tests together with dissemination activities towards all the stakeholders of the electricity value chain will recommend business models and deployment roadmaps for the most promising use cases, which, in turn, contribute to the practical implementation of the European Balancing Target Model by 2020.

The WAKEMEUP project objective is to set-up a pilot line for advanced microcontrollers with embedded non-volatile memory, design and manufacturing for the prototyping of innovative applications for the smart mobility and smart society domains. The already defined microcontrollers with 40nm embedded flash technology will be consolidated to build a solid manufacturing platform. Additional developments will be performed for the integration of memory, power management, connectivity, hard security on the same chip. The project will also target the industrialization of the embedded Phase Change Memory (PCM) technology built on top of the FDSOI 28nm logic process pilot line. The development of the ePCM will be driven by the final application requirements as well as decreasing the power consumption. The alternative memory solutions will be also studied as they have different - and complementary - traits in such areas as read/write speed, power and energy consumption, retention and endurance, and device density and benchmarked with the ePCM and the conventional eFlash. Continued advances in materials, device physics, architectures and design could further reduce the energy consumption of these memories. To achieve this goal of generating high value added semiconductor circuits in Europe in a breakthrough leading edge technology the project will deploy all the necessary activities to bring a new technology to an early industrial maturity stage. These activities encompass such developments as: technology enhancements for various specific application requirements such as wide temperature range and reliability, high security requests, high flexibility…, design enablment allowing first time silicon success, prototyping demonstrator products in the different application areas. In the WAKEMEUP project, new devices and systems will be developed by the application partners in automotive and secure based on FD-SOI and embedded digital technology to answer specific applications needs.

CREATE-IoT’s aim is to stimulate collaboration between IoT initiatives, foster the take up of IoT in Europe and support the development and growth of IoT ecosystems based on open technologies and platforms. This requires synchronisation and alignment on strategic and operational terms through frequent, multi-directional exchanges between the various activities under the IoT Focus Areas (FAs). It also requires cross fertilisation of the various IoT Large Scale Pilots (LSPs) for technological and validation issues of common interest across the various application domains and use cases. CREATE-IoT will align the activities with the Alliance for Internet of Things Innovation (AIOTI) and will coordinate and support the upcoming LSPs in sustaining the ecosystems developed during those projects through mapping the pilot architecture approaches, address interoperability and standards approaches at technical and semantic levels for object connectivity, protocols, data formats, privacy, security, trusted IoT, open APIs and share the road-mapping with international initiatives. The project will foster the exchange on requirements for legal accompanying measures, development of common methodologies and KPI for design, testing and validation and for success and impact measurement, federation of pilot activities and transfer to other pilot areas, facilitating the access for IoT entrepreneurs/API developers/makers, SMEs, including combination of ICT & Art. CREATE-IoT will build strong connections with Member States' initiatives and other initiatives and will transfer learning points to the broader IoT policy framework that include contractual PPPs (e.g. Big Data, Factories of the Future, 5G-infrastructure), Joint Technology Initiatives (e.g. ECSEL), European Innovation Partnerships (e.g. on Smart Cities) as well as other FAs (e.g. on Autonomous transport). It will also maintain a coordinated working relationship with the parallel CSA that is centere on RRI-SSH.

The IT²RAIL -“Information Technologies for Shift to rail” proposal, first step towards the long term IP4 -“IT for an Attractive Railway” SHIFT²RAIL Innovation Programme, aims at providing a new seamless travel experience, giving access to a complete multimodal travel offer which connects the first and last mile to long distance journeys. This is achieved through the introduction of a ground breaking Technical Enabler based on two concepts: • the traveler is placed at the heart of innovative solutions, accessing all multimodal travel services (shopping, ticketing, and tracking) through its travel-companion. • An open published framework is providing full interoperability whilst limiting impacts on existing systems, without prerequisites for centralized standardization. This Technical Enabler will be completely settled in the context of the SHIFT²RAIL IP4, and IT²RAIL is proposing a reduced approach to the scale of a specified use case without weakening any of the key concepts of IP4, such as the usage of Semantic Web technologies, meta planning on distributed data, travel companion with a protected and secured personal wallet stored in the cloud and including the rights to travel. The use case will be defined as a specific instantiation of our open concepts, and will benefit from a completely scalable architecture fully instantiated in IP4. This approach is addressing all the key challenges of the work program, supporting a complete door-to- door intermodal travel offer and proposing a seamless integration of the very diverse existing and future services for planning, one-stop-shop ticketing, and real-time re-accommodation. Moreover, thanks to an Interoperability framework which insulates travel applications from the standards fragmentation in multimodal transport, IT²RAIL liberates business-model innovations in the market-place, guaranteeing the economic self-sustainability of these e-services in the long-term.

In the era of hyper-connected digital economies, the smart technologies play a vital role in the operation of the Electrical Power and Energy Systems (EPES), transforming it into a new, decentralised model with multiple benefits, such as distributed generation, pervasive control, remote monitoring, and self-healing. However, the growing number of cybersecurity incidents in EPES promotes the need for shielding against a variety of threats, ranging from cyberattacks, dynamic and evolving Advanced Persistent Threats (APTs), and privacy violations, to electricity disturbances and severe human errors caused by lack of relevant training. The diverse threats that modern EPES are facing require novel and holistic solutions that employ cutting-edge technologies to detect and mitigate threats, while continuously assessing the dynamic EPES environment, ensuring compliance with the latest cybersecurity standards and training the EPES personnel to appropriately respond to cybersecurity incidents and mitigate the human-error factor. Considering these, ELECTRON aims at delivering a new-generation EPES platform, capable of empowering the resilience of energy systems against cyber, privacy, and data attacks through four main pillars (risk assessment and certification, anomaly detection and prevention, failure mitigation and energy restoration, and addressing internal threats and gaps through AR-VR-based personnel training and certification), while fostering the cyber protection standardisation and certification via three novel authorities, namely the cybersecurity lighthouse, the cybersecurity training and certification authority, and the energy trading centre.