General conditions

1. Admissibility conditions: described in Annex A and Annex E of the Horizon Europe Work Programme General Annexes

Proposal page limits and layout: described in Part B of the Application Form available in the Submission System

2. Eligible countries: described in Annex B of the Work Programme General Annexes

A number of non-EU/non-Associated Countries that are not automatically eligible for funding have made specific provisions for making funding available for their participants in Horizon Europe projects. See the information in the Horizon Europe Programme Guide.

3. Other eligibility conditions: described in Annex B of the Work Programme General Annexes

If projects use satellite-based earth observation, positioning, navigation and/or related timing data and services, beneficiaries must make use of Copernicus and/or Galileo/EGNOS (other data and services may additionally be used).

4. Financial and operational capacity and exclusion: described in Annex C of the Work Programme General Annexes

5. Evaluation and award:

• Award criteria, scoring and thresholds are described in Annex D of the Work Programme General Annexes

• Submission and evaluation processes are described in Annex F of the Work Programme General Annexes and the Online Manual

To ensure a balanced portfolio covering as many strategic sectors as possible, grants will be awarded to proposal not only in order of ranking but also to achieve broadest coverage of the following sectors which are not covered by higher-ranked proposals, provided that the proposals attain all thresholds:, strategic for European competitiveness: industrial automation, renewable energy, electro-mobility, and farming, and which are not covered by higher-ranked proposals, provided that the proposals attain all thresholds.

• Indicative timeline for evaluation and grant agreement: described in Annex F of the Work Programme General Annexes

6. Legal and financial set-up of the grants: described in Annex G of the Work Programme General Annexes

Beneficiaries may provide financial support to third parties to increase the innovation capacity of industry, in particular SMEs, through take-up and validation of emerging edge platform interfaces, in particular to foster edge solutions, which represent a modular functional spectrum of executable apps and services.

The support to third parties can only be provided in the form of grants, for maximum of 20% of the requested EU contribution..

The maximum amount to be granted to each third party is EUR 200 000 in order to support industry, in particular SMEs, in take-up and validation of emerging edge platform interfaces, in particular to foster edge solutions, which represent a modular functional spectrum of executable apps and services.

Specific conditions

7. Specific conditions: described in the [specific topic of the Work Programme]

Documents

Call documents:

Standard application form — call-specific application form is available in the Submission System

Standard application form (HE RIA, IA)

Standard evaluation form — will be used with the necessary adaptations

Standard evaluation form (HE RIA, IA)

MGA

HE General MGA v1.0

Additional documents:

HE Main Work Programme 2023–2024 – 1. General Introduction

HE Main Work Programme 2023–2024 – 7. Digital, Industry and Space

HE Main Work Programme 2023–2024 – 13. General Annexes

HE Programme Guide

HE Framework Programme and Rules for Participation Regulation 2021/695

HE Specific Programme Decision 2021/764

EU Financial Regulation

Rules for Legal Entity Validation, LEAR Appointment and Financial Capacity Assessment

EU Grants AGA — Annotated Model Grant Agreement

Funding & Tenders Portal Online Manual

Funding & Tenders Portal Terms and Conditions

Funding & Tenders Portal Privacy Statement

Information on financial support to third parties (HE)

Projects are expected to contribute to the following outcomes:

• Implementations of edge paradigms in real environments leading to matured and customised IoT and next generation edge computing technologies for adoption in key applications and sectors.
• Paving the way to strategic industrial cooperation in data processing required to support future hyper-distributed applications by building open platforms, agreement on common architectures and standards, critical to establishing a mature European supply chain.
• Open platforms underpinning an emerging open edge ecosystem including midcaps, SMEs and start-ups that foster edge solutions, which represent a modular functional spectrum of executable apps and services critical to establishing a mature European supply chain under challenging and extremely competitive market conditions.
• Demonstrating cross-domain standardisation and up-scaling of edge infrastructure solutions

Proposals should target up-take and up-scaling of emerging EU-driven smart industrial internet of things and edge computing systems to perform under real life conditions, as to mature particular technologies like meta-operating systems for the IoT and the Edge, cognitive cloud technologies and tools for decentralized intelligence and swarm computing for adoption across key applications and sectors crucial for Europe’s competitiveness and open strategic autonomy.

Such systems must be targeted in order to create value in orchestrating multi-tiered data processing with control and automation on the edge, minimizing energy footprint, stimulating multi-sided marketplaces, and fostering open standards for virtualization, interoperability and secure and trusted data sharing between different stakeholders of the value chain – both horizontally and vertically, thereby providing an environment of multi-platform capabilities and preventing lock-in effects for users. Pilots are to implement and demonstrate mature solutions, on technology integration such as sensors, actuators, distributed control, connectivity and edge computing and embedded reasoning to demonstrate security, resilience and autonomy of system with low data processing latency for analytics and AI-inference and decentralised intelligence at the edge. In order to avoid concurrent solutions and fragmented standards and tools, pilots should validate cross-domain interfaces and common standards and foster cross-sector industrial agreements on architectures, design tools and governance. With the cross-domain up-take these pilots will demonstrate shorter development circles, accelerate adoption of edge infrastructure through shared cross-domain usage, especially through the creation of common management tools and standardised edge architectures

The objective is the development of systems to become open platforms underpinning an emerging open edge ecosystem including midcaps, SMEs and start-ups that foster edge solutions, which represent a modular functional spectrum of executable apps and services critical to establishing a mature European supply chain under challenging and extremely competitive market conditions

Innovation Actions are used to customise, explore the limits, test, optimise and validate emerging European smart IoT and edge computing systems under the constraints of industrial mass-market applications, by taking a system-level approach from hardware of smart devices to operating systems at device and at system level, to middleware and to application software. Pilots are expected to address cross-sector platforms in more than one application domain, which are strategic for European competitiveness such as renewable energy, buildings and electro-mobility, farming and/or industrial automation, including strategic aspects such as condition-monitoring/predictive maintenance and logistics, or other relevant application domains.

Pilot projects will contribute to the coherence/cluster work that will be implemented by the CSA called under WP2024-DATA-01-05, supporting the activities defined under ""Horizontal Activities"" below. This requires that they contribute to clustering their results of horizontal nature (interoperability approach, standards, security and governance approaches, validation of emerging business models for an emerging IoT/edge infrastructure and sustainability, methodologies, metrics, etc.). Links to RRF investments towards the next wave of modernization of European infrastructure should be explored.

Multidisciplinary research activities should address all the following aspects:

• Proposals submitted under this topic should include a business case and exploitation strategy.
• Research should build on existing standards or contribute to standardisation. Interoperability for data sharing should be addressed.
• Projects should build on or seek collaboration with existing projects and develop synergies with other relevant European, national or regional initiatives, funding programmes and platforms such as KDT JU, GAIA-X, et al.

In this topic the integration of the gender dimension (sex and gender analysis) in research and innovation content is not a mandatory requirement

Activities are expected to start at TRL 3-4 and achieve TRL 6-7 by the end of the project – see General Annex B.