Looking ahead: ARTEMIS & Horizon 2020
ARTEMIS’ ambitions for the future correspond well with the priorities of the European Commission’s next framework programme. Horizon 2020 has placed a significant emphasis on addressing the grand societal challenges facing Europe, including climate change, the environment, energy and transport. Considering the integration of embedded systems into such a variety of applications, it is unsurprising that this sector will have a key role to play.
The president of the ARTEMIS Industry Association Steering Board, Professor Heinrich Daembkes, along with ARTEMIS secretary general, Dr Jan Lohstroh, and ARTEMIS office director, Mr Ad ten Berg, outlined the role ARTEMIS will place in the next framework programme.
Professor Heinrich Daembkes advised: “Technology, and so embedded systems, is fundamental to the approaches that must be explored in relation to how Europe will react to societal challenges, such as the trend towards urbanisation, intelligent mobility, the scarcity of resources, or energy efficiency, for example. In all of these areas, smart systems, embedded systems, and netted systems play a core role.
“Traditionally, we have been working within a given system, so, for instance, inside a car or tram or plane or industrial automation system. We have been, and continue to be, very busy in developing embedded systems that can be used to control the overall system, and now, these control electronics elements, these embedded systems, are getting smarter; they are able to communicate to each other, and they are also able to gather large amounts of information from the environment.”
Reliability
Cyber physical systems are able to communicate with infrastructure, or, for instance, a heart pacemaker can monitor environmental stress and changing conditions. Each individual system that is able to communicate with the outside world is therefore generating more value and creating something new out of these communication capabilities is the next step.
However, as Daembkes underlined, reliability is a key issue as: “If you want to rely on such information, then you need to be sure that it is reliable – to take the cyber physical systems that could be used in an aircraft, as an example, if a plane is flying from A to B, in future, a 4D trajectory will be used, using both the 3D space and a time stamp, which is created at each leg of the journey to ensure that only one aircraft is in one area at a given time. Thus, during the flight, the aircraft needs to communicate with its environment, and it is of paramount importance that this communication is of the highest quality.
“Quality of service will be something that will therefore concern us in the future so that we can develop reliable services for safety critical applications.”
Lab-to-market
A further focus of Horizon 2020 is to decrease the time that it takes to develop a product or application and get it to the marketplace. This is also an area that ARTEMIS has begun to explore, as office director ten Berg explained: “We have tried to group our organisations into centres of innovation excellence that work together in order to speed up the time it takes for research outcomes to reach the market. Moreover, the ARTEMIS Innovation Projects (AIPPs) are large projects that focus on innovation more so than research, meaning that they are also trying to have a bigger impact on the market.”
Daembkes continued by highlighting how, during the execution of the first phase of ARTEMIS, it was recognised that, due to the available instruments, the focus was essentially on the research and early development aspects, thus making it difficult to bring innovations to market.
“Innovation, of course,” he added, “means invention plus introduction into application, and recently we have developed a new instrument called IPP, Innovation Pilot Projects, which is helping us to overcome this so called ‘valley of death’.”
Alongside developing strategies and instruments to speed up the lab-to-market process, a strong co-operative relationship between industry and academia is crucial.
Daembkes explained: “At the science level – which also includes the work that is being undertaken at universities – the research teams are bringing new ideas up to technology readiness level three, or thereabouts. This is using the 1-9 scale, where 1 is discovery, and 9 means is full deployment, and so 3 is where the proof is being done in a lab, 6 is the demonstrator level, and 7, 8, 9 involves bringing it into application.
“The science partners are thus in the lower part of the tier, but the ideas are then picked up by industry in order to bring it into application. It is, nevertheless, important for researchers to get feedback on the real needs of industry, because this, in some instances, can be missing. In our projects, we therefore have a very close working relationship between the two areas.”
He continued: “The networks that we have established in recent years have, indeed, enabled us to established a very fruitful environment of co-operation, whereby research organisations are directing their activities to practically usable applications. Nevertheless, we also need to be sure that industry, at least in these IPPs, has the lead, and that we are not just following academic interest.
“It is similarly important that standardised approaches are developed, as these new technologies – computers, smartphones, communication technologies – only work if there are transnational standards.”
