Leti, a research institute of CEA Tech and coordinator of the pan-European consortium FED4SAE, today announced that the 14 project partners have launched a three-year European Commission program to facilitate the acceleration of European cyber-physical-system (CPS) solutions to market. This project will boost digitization of European industry by strengthening companies' competitiveness in the CPS market.

Cyber-physical systems link the physical world (e.g., through sensors or actuators) with the virtual world of information processing. They are comprised of diverse constituent parts that function together to create some global behavior. These constituents may include software systems, communications technology, and sensors/actuators that interact with the real world, often including embedded technologies.

The FED4SAE project, launched in September in Grenoble, will create a pan-European network of Digital Innovation Hubs (DIH) by leveraging existing regional tech or businesses ecosystems across complete value chains and multiple competencies. The network of DIHs will enable startups, SMEs and midcap companies in all sectors to build and create new digital products, smart applications and services. The project mission also includes innovation management – linking these companies to suppliers and investors to create innovative CPS solutions and accelerate their development and industrialization.

"FED4SAE will give birth to a competitive ecosystem that will help European startups, SMEs and midcaps innovate and thrive as they access leading technology sources, competencies and industrial platforms," said Leti project coordinator, Isabelle Dor. "The network will also effectively link them to well-connected business infrastructures, such as banks, investors and business accelerators, and existing regional innovation hubs.

"Bottom line: the expanded adoption of CPS solutions offered by the network is expected to lead to quantifiable increases in the participating companies' market share, productivity and industrial capacities," Dor said.

The FED4SAE project will fund industrial projects thanks to the cascade-funding process set by the European Commission. There will be three open calls over the course of the project. The first call, which opens Nov. 14, will support the best projects based on their innovation potential and technical expertise, the maturity of the solution, with technology-readiness levels between 3 and 6, and their efficient management of the innovation to create a lasting impact with the developed solution.

This pan-European network will enable companies to use CPS platforms combined with expertise and knowhow from the R&D advanced platforms. The ultimate goal of each industrial project within FED4SAE is to develop a complete solution that can get to market and scale.

This includes combining hardware and software components and deploying them in a range of testbeds prior to deployment into the targeted market, as well as support in business modeling and market insights through guidance from conceptual design through market launch. Application experiments will be funded for developing innovative CPS products that will increase the competitiveness of European innovative companies.

Proposals can be submitted from Nov. 14 to Feb. 6, 2018, for the first open call. The expected average funding per applicant is €50,000 with a maximum of €60,000 for one application experiment.

Details about the project, including available competencies, platforms and design centers, as well as all necessary guidelines, templates and eligibility documents are available at www.FED4SAE.eu.

The FED4SAE project, whose name is short for Federated CPS Digital Innovation Hubs for the Smart Anything Everywhere, is in alignment with the European Commission's Smart Anything Everywhere initiative.

An additional goal of the €6.7 million project is to assure the sustainability of the Digital Innovation Hubs network by setting it up to:

• Serve as an added value, one-stop-shop that facilitates cross-border partnerships between innovators and suppliers
• Link innovators to investors associated with the pan-European network of Digital Innovation Hubs to increase funding opportunities and enable the next steps of companies' development   
• Develop cooperation with regional organizations and key stakeholders to acquire public and/or private investment to support FED4SAE network activities.
  
  

In addition to Leti, which is coordinating the project, participants that will help companies develop their CPS are:

• Intel Research and Development Ireland (Ireland)
• STMicroelectronics SRL (Italy)
• STMicroelectronics Grenoble (France)
• Thales SA (France)
• AVL List GmbH (Austria)
• Digital Catapult (UK)
• Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft (Germany)
• Fortiss GmbH (Germany)
• CSEM (Switzerland)
• KTH Royal Institute of Technology (Sweden)
• Budapest University of Technology and Economics (Hungary)
• Cantabria University (Spain)
• Blumorpho SAS (France)