ITEA Success stories

A key challenge faced by city operators, municipalities and political decision makers is the fragmentation of information into silo-oriented closed systems and organisation models. This project aims to deliver an integrated 3D digital model and information platform that facilitates information collection, sharing, management, analysis and dissemination from diverse public and private urban infrastructures and resources. The platform supports public authorities to improve quality and efficiency of municipal services. Furthermore, adequate security and authentication methods allow selected urban data sources to be exposed to the full smart city ecosystem, enabling new innovative data-driven applications and services.

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Today automotive software-intensive systems are developed in silos by each car manufacturer or original equipment manufacturer (OEM) in-house. This approach cannot meet the long-term challenges of the industry. One solution is to establish a standard car-to-cloud connection, open for external applications and the use of open source software wherever possible without compromising safety and security. The APPSTACLE result will include an open and secure cloud platform that interconnects a wide range of vehicles to the cloud via open in-car and Internet connection and is supported by an integrated open source software development ecosystem.

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The convergence of cloud, communication and IoT infrastructure plus the trend towards virtual applications (e.g. migrating software to the cloud) create new challenges for application developers and infrastructure providers. The resulting systems are complex with dynamic resources hiding possible problems. This creates a requirement for flexible monitoring and optimisation methods. The Flex4Apps project addresses the challenges of monitoring and optimising large, distributed, cyber-physical systems. The goal of the project is to provide a solution to manage the high data volumes and complexity of system monitoring whilst disturbing the target system as little as possible.

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Electric vehicles, connectivity and autonomous driving functions will revolutionise the automotive domain, which is a major challenge for vehicle manufacturers. Customers should be willing to pay for autonomous driving features that are a small part of the total car costs. The rationale behind DANGUN is that rather than using expensive sensors a comparable performance can be achieved through the close cooperation of suppliers of advanced perception sensors, vehicle manufactures and academia. The DANGUN project aims to develop a Traffic Jam Pilot function with autonomous capabilities using low-cost automotive components.

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Reflexion will support high-tech industry by providing significant improvements in quality and stability during early product roll-out. The results will include the ability to react to unforeseen problems or emerging needs in a speedy and cost-effective way by augmenting products with a layer of data sensing and data-analytics to quickly infer ‘missed’ or ‘misunderstood’ end-customer requirements; detecting issues that escape product release testing and product items that need service and maintenance attention. This knowledge is used to further improve the product.

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Future mobility solutions will increasingly rely on smart components that continuously monitor the environment and assume more and more responsibility for a convenient, safe and reliable operation. Currently the single most important roadblock for this market is the ability to come up with an affordable, safe multi-core development methodology that allows industry to deliver trustworthy new functions at competitive prices. ASSUME will provide a seamless engineering methodology, which addresses this roadblock on the constructive and analytic side

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Fuse-IT will address the need for sustainable, reliable, userfriendly, efficient, safe and secure Building Management System (BMS) in the context of smart critical sites. A main purpose is to solve the dilemma between efficiency and security in intelligent & strategic buildings. The result of FUSE-IT will be a smart secured building system, incorporating secured share sensors, effectors and devices strongly interconnected through trusted federated energy & information networks, a core building data processing & analysis module, a smart unified building management interface and a full security dashboard. Remote multisite monitoring will be implemented, taking advantage of big data analytics.

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A strong growth forecast in the digital pathology market for the next five years combined with a decreasing number of qualified pathologists will lead to a tremendous increase in workload in the pathology departments of clinical and pharmaceutical organisations. On top of this there is an urgent need for higher quality diagnostic information enabling more effective and efficient treatments. The 3DPathology project will address these needs by creating a fast, digital, quantitative, spectroscopic and multimodal 3D pathology analysis system.

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C³PO aims at providing a Cloud collaborative and semantic platform for city co-design. The C³PO platform is unique in that it covers the whole urban project development process where cities empower, encourage and guide different stakeholders (citizens, decision makers, architects, etc.) to develop an urban project together. C³PO does not intend to replace or modify the existing applications offering unique but partial solutions of city co-design (simulation tool, open API, 3D modelling and visualisation, gaming tool, etc.) but can be seen as an open and generic intermediary that enables the interaction between existing applications through a unique multi-dimensional semantic repository (covering the different types of information in city codesign like GIS, BIM, electricity grids, traffic, etc.). As such, C³PO will enable the capitalisation of existing applications and data sources by enabling their integration as services, or by enabling them to exploit the C³PO Open API

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Virtual system development (“frontloading”) is getting more and more important in a plenitude of industrial domains to reduce development times, stranded costs and time-to-market. Co-simulation is a particularly promising approach for interoperable modular development. However, the coupling and integration of real-time systems into simulation environments (especially of systems of distributed HiL systems and simulations) still requires enormous effort. The aim of ACOSAR is to develop both a non-proprietary “Distributed Co-simulation Protocol” (DCP) for integration of simulation and testing environments and an according integration methodology, which shall be a substantial contribution to international standardization (FMI). The results of ACOSAR will lead to a modular, considerably more flexible as well as shorter system development process for numerous industrial domains and will enable the establishment of new business models.

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Most product innovations today are enabled through software components, so it is no surprise that software is the primary means of competitive differentiation. Software plays a key role in the digitalisation of many products that hitherto were completely driven by electronics, so scaling software in a controlled and efficient way is crucial, and represents a major challenge for organisations. The required transformations are often driven by the technological evolution of products, systems or services as well as by how the business and the company are organised. In many instances, existing processes must be reshaped, and new best practices and tools incorporated. The challenge taken up by the ITEA project SCALARE, a joint effort of industry and academia from five countries, was how to support and enable organisations in scaling their software capability in a systematic, proactive way.

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The M2MGrids project aimed at creating enablers for a dynamic cyber-physical information ecosystem that would interoperate in real time with the business processes of companies with real-life objects, people and things. M2MGrids focused on major disruptions in targeted energy and mobility domains. The disruption in the energy domain was related to operating models and the high cost of peak hours in energy grids. To make more efficient use of the energy grid, there needed to be a flexible and automated means by which to control both consumption and generation between multiple energy stakeholders and prosumers. The inability of multiple stakeholder systems to exchange information in dynamic situations (such as in a traffic accident) was leading to disruptions in the mobility domain.

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Innovation is much more than creating technology; it must ‘go to market’. Many companies need new ways to rapidly validate the match between the market and their innovative ICT-intensive technology. The ITEA project ACCELERATE took up the challenge of enabling the mass adoption of acceleration knowhow by European technology companies by focusing on two goals: the transfer of knowledge on a massive scale and the introduction of a new type of product development, the so-called validated learning process that systematically searches for the technology-market match by validating the mechanics of a business model. This way ACCELERATE set out to shorten the innovation cycle and time-to-market, and to increase the number of new products or solutions as well as the number of ideas that are accelerated and/or created.

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Three main challenges were confronted by the BENEFIT project. Firstly, there is the societal aspect of coping with the increasing number of minimally invasive image guided interventions. Secondly, the economic dimension concerns delivering care with quantified targets in terms of quantity, price and quality of care. The third element was to show the technical feasibility of an integrated infrastructure that includes all relevant imaging and data sources, the modelling, analysis and presentation of these data and the integration into a Clinical Decision Support System. The BENEFIT project addressed these challenges by developing new imaging procedures and quantification and analysis methods to collect information before, during and at the end of an interventional treatment.

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Cyber-physical systems (CPS) are very large systems that not only involve a large number of stakeholders but are safety critical and have significant impact on the economy and the environment as well. This makes tools for the safe and efficient design and operation of such systems imperative. The ITEA project MODRIO, which ran from 2012 to 2016, was set up to extend modelling and simulation tools based on open standards (Modelica and FMI) from system design to system operation.

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The ITEA 2 project OPEES stood at the inception of two important trends: open collaboration with open source in industry and open source tools for model-based systems engineering (MBSE). Neither of these trends were well developed in 2009, but almost 10 years later, and with acceleration through the OPEES project, we benefit from both good open source MBSE tools and many open collaboration initiatives in industry. OPEES was both a pioneer and a catalyst in this evolution.

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Radiotherapy affects not only cancer cells but also healthy cells in the area that is being treated, so it is important that as little healthy tissue as possible is affected. The problem is that the movement of a tumour under the effect of respiration, for example, risks damaging surrounding tissue, whereas MRI, the only imaging modality that can visualise the tumour well, traditionally takes minutes to create the image. Thanks to the strong results from the ITEA SoRTS project, physicians can now precisely target a tumour, even when tumour tissue changes shape, location, size or composition during treatment. Patients benefit from a less intrusive treatment enabling them to continue their daily lives.

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Ten years ago, virtual worlds were already found in serious computer games and simulation models. However, they were mostly standalone and independent of each other with little or no connection to the real world. The ITEA project Metaverse1 set out to overcome this isolation – defining a standard to enable connectivity and interoperability between virtual worlds and with the real world. The objective was to define interoperability in such a way that it would be possible to exchange information between worlds. Even more important was the development of a standard interface between the real physical world and the virtual – simulation/ serious games – world. This made it possible to attach real world sensors, such as body parameter or environmental sensors, to provide input to simulations or alternatively obtain feedback from such models into the real world, for example to control lighting, temperature or ventilation or for personal wellbeing.

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The ITEA 2 projects AMALTHEA and AMALTHEA4public are part of a 'string of pearls' in the automotive domain; successes that have pushed this domain into the next phase of its development. AUTOSAR, a result from the former ITEA project EAST-EEA, defined a methodology for component-based development of automotive software and a standardised software architecture for automotive electronic control units. However, AUTOSAR offered only limited support for detailed behaviour descriptions, which are indispensable for developing much more complex multi-core systems of high quality. Those require an increased exchange between tools. Multi-core optimisation especially relies on additional information like detailed timing behaviour. AMALTHEA set about adapting existing development methods and tools and creating a common model that offers the required description capabilities on different abstraction levels. The follow-up project AMALTHEA4public was set up to foster the transfer into application and to create a sustainable open (“public”) platform and a vibrant community of users and contributors.

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The number of people experiencing chronic disease is increasing dramatically worldwide. The impact of chronic diseases is evident: it has been estimated that the cost of five of the major chronic illnesses could reach USD 47 trillion over the next 20 years and could claim almost 400 million lives within 10 years. The ITEA 2 MoSHCA project was geared towards improving patient-doctor interactions, controlling chronic diseases, developing technological set-ups that significantly improve the self-management of chronic illnesses, promoting communication between the patient and the health provider and supporting health staff in providing better clinical follow-up.

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The international landscape is quite diverse in terms of interactive software systems as they should be used in a wide spectrum of contexts of use. Each context of use covers various types of users along with their interactive tasks, using potentially several computing platforms or devices in multiple physical, organisational and psychological environments and locations. In addition, practices for developing user interfaces of these interactive software systems are even more heterogeneous. Evolving in so many diverse contexts of use is particularly challenging when the same system should be deployed for several targets. In theory, a single version of the software should be produced so that it is adapted to each context of use. In practice, this is simply impossible to do due to lack of resources and knowledge

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HPC is essential in meeting the demand for increased processing power for future research and development in many domains. The goal of the ITEA project H4H was to provide a highly efficient, hybrid programming environment for heterogeneous computing clusters to enable easier development of HPC applications and optimise application performance. The project also aimed at providing a new infrastructure for HPC cloud computing and a new cooling technology to reduce energy needed to operate the HPC system.

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Due to the dramatic increase in the complexity of the software itself and the sheer magnitude of the customisability of the software, software-intensive systems have become increasingly difficult to develop and verify by traditional development processes and testing methods.The ITEA project ATAC aimed to resolve such challenges. The overarching goal was to push the functional, safety and security requirements coverage envelope while greatly reducing the required testing effort for both the fully automated and remaining manual test cases.

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Smart buildings of the future need comprehensive and extendible cross-domain management and control functionality that today’s building automation and management systems (BAS) do not adequately provide. The BaaS (Building as a Service) project was set out to tackle these challenges by introducing a novel semantic IoT service framework for commercial buildings along with a reference architecture and corresponding software platform as a basis for current and future commercial building automation and management technologies.

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Nowadays, a wealth of data is available. However the access to efficient analytic tools is often difficult. The ITEA project CAP (Collaborative Analytic Platform), contributed to the development of new sustainable business models and laid the foundation for a market value proposition of ‘Big Data as a Service’. Thanks to the project results, La Poste will be able to save several million euros with the same control workforces.

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