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What is COP-PILOT

The rise of edge computing, combined with advanced 5G connectivity, has enabled large-scale deployments of private edge systems, driving innovation across various industries and advancing market digitization. As infrastructure technologies mature, services and platform software are expected to lead in delivering added value through automation and intelligence at the network’s edge. Fully exploiting the potential of edge intelligence requires more than enhanced IoT processing and low-latency services; it demands the development of collaborative platform environments that enable advanced services and inspire growth across the value chain.

As an Innovation Action funded under the EU HORIZON program, COP-PILOT aims to develop a Collaborative Open Platform (COP) piloting framework that enables end-to-end orchestration across service domains. The platform looks to integrate novel AI-driven tools, SLA-preserving automation, and secure infrastructure while piloting diverse real-world applications across sectors like energy, smart cities, agriculture, and manufacturing to drive cross-sector collaboration, innovation, and societal impact.

  • Step by step approach to innovation

Key Innovations

COP-PILOT takes a step-by-step approach to innovation, with all proposed advancements aimed at enabling high-TRL and large-scale deployments:
Application-aware IoT device and data management across collaborative domains
Secure and programmable cross-domain resource and data service exposure
Ultra-scalable end-to-end service & infrastructure orchestration across diverse multitenant IoT-Edge-Core environments
Intelligent & automation tools for high-TRL vertical service onboarding and preservation
Promotion of innovative cross-sector vertical services through large-scale pilots
COP-PILOT will offer a scalable platform for IoT data representation, storage, and federation.  
The platform aims to address the heterogeneity of IoT devices and the data they generate.  
It will use standardized NBIs to connect IoT-edge-core systems and overlay services.
COP-PILOT aims to become the first orchestration platform to utilize software-defined zero-trust networking (OpenZiti) to establish a trusted Secure Integration Fabric (SIF) for seamless authentication and dynamic policy management.
The platform will require only a distributed grid of SIF clients per domain to enable zero-trust, high-performance networking, and will eliminate the need for VPNs and their associated management overhead.
SIF secures both control and data planes with end-to-end encryption for IoT devices and data management services.
COP-PILOT adopts a hierarchical approach to solve orchestration challenges, using a cloud-managed end-to-end service orchestrator (ServOrch) for overseeing geo-distributed domains.
Each domain administrator manages resources and data using their infrastructure orchestrator (InfraOrch) within the domain’s vicinity. COP-PILOT ensures that all InfraOrch instances expose an identical API to the ServOrch for consistent service orchestration.
This approach enables the “slicing” of end-to-end services into smaller, independent sub-slices while maintaining connectivity for a unified service perspective.
COP-PILOT will be the first platform that bridges the gap from conceptual to actual integration of intelligent zero-touch solutions using AI extensions across key platform areas.
It will introduce a novel LLM-based user interface that simplifies service onboarding and eliminates user interaction with low-level orchestration APIs.
Implements AI-driven SLA enforcement to ensure compliance by automatically chaining SLA tracking and enforcement services with end-user requirements.
COP-PILOT offers a generic, adaptable framework for deploying and validating intelligent platform services across multiple sectors, enabling rapid scaling and adaptation to specific sector needs without manual interventions.
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  • COP-PILOT

Objectives

Open, multiplayer orchestration platform

To develop and implement an open, multi-layer orchestration platform for deploying and managing collaborative applications during runtime. This platform will span across heterogeneous domains and multiple distributed sectors, leveraging the IoT-to-edge-to-core compute continuum and incorporating specific standardization measures.

The project will design and implement a cloud-managed service orchestrator (ServOrch) with standardized northbound and southbound interfaces to manage end-to-end services across geo-distributed, multi-tenant domains. Complementing it, a distributed grid of infrastructure orchestrators (InfraOrch) will be created, to expose resources as a service to ServOrch and to interface with advanced compute and network controllers. The platform will integrate state-of-the-art infrastructure controllers for radio access networks, transport and data center SDNs, mobile core networks, and computing clusters, including IoT nodes. Additionally, the platform will incorporate heterogeneous IoT platforms, both legacy and advanced, and will establish a secure integration fabric with standardized interfaces for cross-sector interoperability and dynamic infrastructure registration.

To create advanced AI-based extensions that significantly reduce the time and complexity of onboarding large-scale services through a multi-modal user interface powered by large language models (LLMs). These extensions will also seamlessly link end-user service agreements (SLAs) with automated, closed-loop platform services, ensuring SLA compliance through intelligent forecasting (IF), Zero-Touch Invocation (ZI), and Secure Actuation (SA).

The project aims to develop the COP-PILOT LLM-UI plugin, a multimodal interface that translates diverse user inputs (e.g., text, images, software artifacts) into detailed orchestration blueprints for service onboarding, provisioning, and management. It also includes a smart SLA compliance plugin with three core capabilities: Intelligent Forecasting (IF) for predicting SLA violations and linking services to AI-driven platform solutions, Zero-Touch Invocation (ZI) for automated service adjustments to maintain SLAs, and Secure Actuation (SA) to ensure all automated actions are securely executed.

The project will create an “Auto-Pilot” tool for the IoT-to-edge-to-core cloud continuum, enabling infrastructure owners and service providers to: (i) seamlessly register new domain clusters, (ii) automate platform expansion, (iii) declare domain resources and services, (iv) integrate domains into a secure connection fabric, and (v) use declarative policies to assign resources and services to trusted users. This tool leverages open standardized TMF data models and APIs to streamline the connection between stakeholders, infrastructures, and services.

The objective is to enable UI-driven platform expansion into new domains using COP-PILOT’s secure integration fabric, alongside hierarchical federated data management across IoT swarms, edge domains, and core domains. The approach simplifies and secures the integration of IoT hardware and data platforms while allowing programmable, policy-driven associations of resources and services with trusted stakeholders and applications. The ecosystem is strictly defined using open TMF data models and APIs to formalize stakeholder roles, agreements, and resource-service associations.

To design large-scale piloting clusters serving as the basis for the integration of the platform framework and the interconnection of pilot use cases, including 3rd party infrastructures and services.

The project looks to develop a detailed deployment plan, integrate and evaluate the orchestration platform within piloting clusters, incorporate third-party infrastructures to extract service requests, and create deployable blueprints for applications to ensure seamless deployment across diverse remote segments.

To showcase emerging piloting use cases in key industrial sectors (including third-party solutions) that emphasize cross-sector collaboration, intelligent resource management across diverse environments, and enhanced trustworthiness, verified through defined technical KPIs.

The focus is on extracting detailed KPIs and KVI parameters for each piloting use case, defining validation methodologies, and assembling microservices chains adapted to standardized platform interfaces. This will include creating new applications from partners and third parties, compiling service catalogues, and establishing platform services for intelligent resource management, security, and automation across diverse sectors. The process ensures measurable results, with public demonstrations showcasing innovative cross-sector applications enabled by platform capabilities.

To analyse and validate the market potentials and the sustainability impact fingerprint for both the COP-PILOT platform and the targeted strategic piloting use case sectors, concerning the overall value chain of the industry sectors and the related socio-economic and environmental impact.

The project will analyse market needs, limiting factors, and potentials for secure and intelligent collaborative services in strategic sectors. It involves extracting business cases, assessing sustainability benefits, validating commercialization paths, and defining an exploitation strategy focused on the orchestration platform, its features, and advanced use case applications across sectors.

To maximize the impact and adoption of COP-PILOT, through specific standardization and dissemination actions, to promote the platform capabilities, attracting third-party piloting use cases, and highlighting strong business, societal, and scientific benefits contributing to sound market potentials.

The focus is on contributing to ETSI-OSL/TFS/ZSM/OSM framework and extensions to TMF interfacing standards, extracting business models from COP-PILOT platform capabilities, engaging ecosystems through communication and dissemination, and building synergies with European partnerships and initiatives to promote the platform and attract third-party participation.