This project proposes to organise and hold the MANUFUTURE 2017 conference in Estonia during the Estonian Presidency. The conference will focus on the competencies and capabilities that EU companies should develop to move into higher value activities and to become globally competitive. Three major issues will be addressed in the sub-themes of the conference: energy and resource efficient manufacturing, digital manufacturing and collaborative technology innovation. The conference will also look at a number of cross-cutting issues: the development of skills, access to finance, the use of innovative business models and better regulation. This project will support the objectives of the Estonian Presidency as well as promoting the success of the European manufacturing sector.

AI is one of the biggest mega-trends towards the 4th industrial revolution. While these technologies promise business sustainability and product/process quality, it seems that the ever-changing market demands and the lack of skilled humans, in combination with the complexity of technologies, raise an urgent need for new suggestions. Suggestions that will be agile, reusable, distributed, scalable, accountable, secure, standardized and collaborative. To break the entry barriers for these technologies and unleash their potential, the knowlEdge project will develop a new generation of AI methods, systems and data management infrastructure. This framework will provide means for the secure management of distributed data and the computational infrastructure to execute the needed analytic algorithms and redistribute the knowledge towards a knowledge exchange society. To do so, knowlEdge proposes 6 major innovations in the areas of data management, data analytics and knowledge management: (i) A set of AI services that allow the usage of edge deployments as computational and live data infrastructure, an edge continuous learning execution pipeline; (ii) A digital twin of the shop-floor to test the AI models; (iii) A data management framework deployed from the edge to the cloud ensuring data quality, privacy and confidentiality, building a data safe fog continuum; (iv) Human-AI Collaboration and Domain Knowledge Fusion tools for domain experts to inject their experience into the system to trigger an automatic discovery of knowledge that allows the system to adapt automatically to system changes; (v) A set of standardization mechanisms for the exchange of trained AI-models from one context to another; (vi) A knowledge marketplace platform to distribute and interchange AI trained models. The knowlEdge consortium consists of 12 partners from 7 EU countries, and its solution will be tested and evaluated in 3 manufacturing sectors.

The ADMA TranS4MErs will accelerate factories to become Factories of the Future embracing the ecological, digital, and societal challenges. This will be done via a smart combination of an all-connecting community platform in combination with toolboxes, virtual and physical training activities, assistance programs, tailor-made training content in all relevant technology areas and set of applications. All those services, tools, assistance, and service components pick up the SMEs at the right stage to start their own Trans4mation journey. The consortium is equipped with all necessary experience and professionalism and has a wide geographical reach, that we can almost guarantee to deliver the services at their doorstep or on their screen.

The HAL4SDV proposal aligns with the EU Strategic Research and Innovation Agenda 2022 on Electronic Components and Systems. It aims to pioneer methods, technologies, and processes for series vehicle development beyond 2030, driven by anticipated advancements in microelectronics, communication technology, software engineering, and AI. HAL4SDV envisions a future where vehicles are fully integrated into smart cities, intelligent highways, and cyberspace, blurring the lines between inside and outside the vehicle. Assumptions include data-centricity, code portability, efficient data fusion, unlimited scalability, real-time capabilities, and robust cybersecurity. The objectives encompass unifying software interfaces, creating a hardware abstraction framework, enabling Over-The-Air (OTA) updates, designing platform architectures, ensuring hardware abstraction and virtualization, offering hardware support, automating integration, supporting safety features, harnessing edge computing, implementing security measures, and providing essential development tools. By focusing on these objectives, HAL4SDV aims to establish a unified ecosystem for software-defined vehicles, positioning Europe's automotive industry for continued leadership post-2030 while leveraging existing results and technologies to accelerate progress.

The Shift2SDV project aims to revolutionize the European automotive domain by creation of an SDV ecosystem around middleware & API framework enabling collaboration across the automotive value chain. This ambitious endeavour envisions a comprehensive shift towards a modular framework that transcends the limitations of current monolithic systems, fostering agility and innovation through the development of complementary middleware services and software development solutions. Central to Shift2SDV is the development of a cutting-edge middleware framework that provides micro-services to build automotive applications upon, abstracting from underlying hardware components – supporting stepwise migration, open source and proprietary components, in-vehicle safety critical and off-vehicle cloud functionality. It is specifically designed to streamline software development and integration while ensuring compatibility and flexibility with existing and emerging technologies. Key technical objectives include the development of a modern, flexible micro-services-based architecture, middleware framework that simplifies the brand-specific application development, and establishment of a safe and secure system architecture compliant with functional safety standards. Additionally, the project aims to develop an orchestration for efficient resource management, integrate edge and cloud computing, and demonstrate the practical viability of the developed middleware through concrete use cases. To maximize impact, Shift2SDV prioritizes active communication, dissemination, and exploitation of project outcomes, fostering collaboration among stakeholders and existing projects and initiatives aligning technological advancements with market demands. Through these concerted efforts, Shift2SDV seeks to propel European leadership in Software Defined Vehicles, driving innovation and economic growth in the automotive industry.