Flexibility needs to be added to Europe’s power system to accommodate an increasing share of variable power generation from renewable sources. Indeed, service quality issues start to arise on the grid when this share in electricity consumption reaches 10%. To meet the EU’s targets for reduction of greenhouse gas emissions this share should rise to 30% by 2030 and up to 50% by 2050. The cost of this transition and the necessary measures to guarantee stable and continuous supply are a major political concern. The SABINA project responds to it by targeting the cheapest possible source of flexibility: the existing thermal inertia in buildings and the coupling between heat and electricity networks it enables. This coupling requires accurately estimating the thermal inertia of many buildings. SABINA’s partner the University of Navarra has created a breakthrough, automatic method for this estimation, which shall be scaled up, validated and integrated in a complete management system through this project. This system will operate on two complementary time horizons: • One day: aggregation and management at the district level of the electric and thermal flexibilities, and conversion and storage of the excess electrical energy to thermal energy in the freely available building inertia. • Seconds to minutes: local control of inverters feeding renewable electricity to the grid, with optimal parameters automatically determined at the district level. Research partners will develop novel control and optimization algorithms, and integrate and evaluate the system in lab and operational settings. The SABINA solution is compatible with both new and existing buildings; it is planned to be deployed within five years of the end of the project. Lead users are present in the consortium: Telvent and SMS plc, the coordinator, for the architecture, and Insero for the business model it enables; compliance and contribution to relevant standards will be ensured by the European Digital SME Alliance

According to the EU Cyber Resilience Act, “hardware and software products are increasingly subject to successful cyberattacks, leading to an estimated global annual cost of cybercrime of EUR 5.5 trillion by 2021”. This is due to a low level of cybersecurity, reflected by widespread vulnerabilities and inadequate approaches for identifying and mitigating the rapidly and constantly evolving cyber threats and vulnerabilities, as well as ensuring continuous compliance with regulations, industry standards, and best practices. To reduce the impact of cyberattacks and increase the resilience of digital technologies, it is essential to assess the conformity to security standards of ICT products, services, and processes throughout their life cycle. However, the traditional conformity assessment process is predominantly a static and expensive one-time assurance activity that does not cater to the needs of agile product delivery, which promotes continuous product updates and upgrades, and often changes in requirements. Each such update opens doors to product vulnerabilities, and consequently poses cyber risks for product users and companies’ reputation. To avoid these issues, it is essential to enable a partial and continuous lean re-certification of ICT products, services, and processes, to empower manufacturers to prevent, detect, counter and quickly respond to cyber threats. In response to these challenges, the CERTIFAI project will develop an open software framework for cost-effective AI-driven continuous assessment and (re-)certification of ICT products and services, paving the way for a more secure and trustworthy EU’s digital world. Building on the EU Cybersecurity Act, CERTIFAI will leverage the established cybersecurity requirements, standards, and technical specifications to deliver an efficient approach for ensuring that a product, once certified, will continue to be compliant with relevant standards throughout its life cycle.

certMILS develops a security certification methodology for Cyber-physical systems (CPS). CPS are characterised by safety-critical nature, complexity, connectivity, and open technology. A common downside to CPS complexity and openness is a large attack surface and a high degree of dynamism that may lead to complex failures and irreparable physical damage. The legitimate fear of security or functional safety vulnerabilities in CPS results in arduous testing and certification processes. Once fielded, many CPS suffer from the motto: never change a running system. certMILS increases the economic efficiency and European competitiveness of CPS development, while demonstrating the effectiveness of safety & security certification of composable systems. The project employs a security-by-design concept originating from the avionics industry: Multiple Independent Levels of Security (MILS), which targets controlled information flow and resource usage amongst software applications. certMILS reduces certification complexity, promotes re-use, and enables secure updates to CPS throughout its life-cycle by providing certified separation of applications, i.e. if an application within a complex CPS fails or starts acting maliciously, other applications are unaffected. Security certification of complex systems to medium-high assurance levels is not solved today. The existing monolithic approaches cannot cope with the complexity of modern CPS. certMILS uses ISO/IEC 15408 and IEC 62443 to develop and applies a compositional security certification methodology to complex composable safety-critical systems operating in constantly evolving hostile environments. certMILS core results are standardised in a protection profile.certMILS develops three composable industrial CPS pilots (smart grid, railway, subway), certifies security of critical re-useable components, and ensures security certification for the pilots by certification labs in three EU countries with involvement of the authorities.