The F4iTECH (Federated AI Platform for Industrial Technologies) project revolutionizes the manufacturing and airport industries by integrating Federated Learning (FL) and advanced AI technologies. Through a decentralized platform, F4iTECH enhances operational efficiency, ensures data privacy and optimizes resource management while addressing hidden challenges and reducing costs. With six pilot implementations showcasing transformative impacts, this innovative approach promises a more intelligent, resilient and sustainable future for industrial environments.

Building on its innovative approach, the F4iTECH project not only improves operational workflows but also tackles critical industry challenges such as data transmission, security and privacy. By leveraging FL-based AI, the platform enables real-time monitoring and decision-making without centralizing sensitive data, thereby enhancing compliance with regulatory frameworks and preserving data sovereignty. The integration of blockchain technology further secures data sharing through smart contracts, fostering collaboration among stakeholders while maintaining individual data ownership. The project’s success is evident in its six pilot implementations, which demonstrated tangible benefits like reduced operational inefficiencies, improved resource allocation, and enhanced resilience in both manufacturing and airport sectors. The Figure 1 shows the system approach and user interaction.

Achieved Results

The project successfully demonstrated significant benefits for the manufacturing and airport industries by integrating FL-based AI into production and operational workflows. A major achievement is the development of FLactionTM, a scalable and privacy-preserving federated learning platform that enables decentralized AI training across multiple edge devices with a user-friendly approach for data scientists. FLactionTM supports seamless model aggregation while ensuring data remains on local devices, addressing privacy concerns and regulatory requirements in industrial applications.

In the airport use case, the project delivered solutions that provide stakeholders with highly accurate, real time predictions of passenger flows for specific time windows. By leveraging advanced machine learning models, these insights enabled airports, airlines, and ground handling services to optimize resource allocation, staffing, and facility management, leading to smoother operations and improved passenger experiences. As a result, the project significantly reduced operational inefficiencies stemming from outdated or inaccurate forecasting methods, minimizing delays, overcrowding, and resource mismanagement. Furthermore, the integration of FL-based AI tackled critical industry challenges, particularly in data transmission, security, and privacy. By enabling decentralized data analysis, the solution eliminated the need for large-scale centralized data repositories, thereby enhancing compliance with stringent regulatory frameworks while also preserving data sovereignty for participating stakeholders. This approach not only ensured the confidentiality of sensitive passenger information but also fostered greater collaboration among stakeholders by allowing them to access valuable insights without compromising individual data ownership.

The results of the project are expected to have a lasting impact on different sectors, enhancing operational efficiency, reducing costs and improving stakeholder collaboration. The technologies developed may serve as a foundation for new product developments, standardization efforts, and further research. Additionally, the outcomes of the project, including methodologies and findings, have the potential for publication in major papers, fostering wider adoption and refinement of FL-based AI in industry applications.

Figure 1: F4iTECH Federated Learning Platform Architecture

Impact

F4iTECH delivers significant benefits to the manufacturing, retail and airport industries by seamlessly integrating FL-based AI solutions into industrial processes. Utilizing distributed ledgers, the project securely records all relevant events and transactions within the Industry 4.0 ecosystem, enabling stakeholders and end consumers to intuitively verify data and establish smart contracts. Through systematic AI-driven predictive maintenance and machinery inspection, F4iTECH enhances equipment performance and reduces deterioration rates by 20%. By addressing and resolving hidden operational challenges, the project aims to cut invisible and internalized costs by 15%, contributing to more efficient and cost-effective industrial environments.

Conclusion

The F4iTECH project demonstrates how Federated Learning (FL) and advanced AI technologies can transform industrial sectors by enhancing operational efficiency, data privacy, and resource management. The project’s decentralized approach not only solves hidden challenges but also reduces costs and improves resilience. Future projects/products could build on F4iTECH’s methodologies to explore broader applications of FL-based AI in other industries, advancing data-driven innovation while maintaining stringent privacy standards.

For more information, visit:

https://www.celticnext.eu/project-f4itech/

CDTI is a Business Public Entity under the Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities that promotes innovation and technological development of Spanish companies. This is the entity that engages applications assistance and support R&D&I projects of Spanish companies at national and international level.

Therefore, the aim of CDTI is to contribute to the improvement of the technological level of Spanish companies through the development of the following activities:

› Technical and economic evaluation and awarding of public aid to innovation through subsidies or aid partly refundable R&D projects developed by companies.

› Management and promotion of the Spanish participation in international programmes for technology cooperation.

› Promotion of the international transfer of technology and business support services to technological innovation.

› Support for the establishment and consolidation of technology-based enterprises.

The bulk of its infrastructure is in Madrid but, in addition, CDTI offers to Spanish companies a strategic network of offices and representatives abroad (SOST OFFICES – Spain Office of Science and Technology), specifically in Belgium, Brazil, Chile, China, India, Japan, Korea, Mexico, Morocco and USA, to support them in their technology activities abroad.

News on Funding in Spain

CDTI launches its first INNOGLOBAL Call with FEDER (European Regional Development Fund) funds to reinforce the support in International Cooperation projects labelled from January to October 2025. Projects labelled under CELTIC-NEXT Spring Call 2025 are eligible for this Call. The beneficiaries are Spanish SMEs and mid-caps (up to 500 employees). Subcontracting is possible (not mandatory) up to 50% (70% in Health sector).

Spanish companies that belong to the eligible regions (Andalusia, Balearic Islands, Canary Islands, Castilla-La Mancha, Castilla y León, Valencian Community, Extremadura, Galicia, and Murcia) will be able to benefit with grants up to 80% of the budget.

The fundable activities are industrial research and/or experimental development. The eligible costs include personnel, instruments / material, subcontracting, general expenses, audit, travel and indirect costs. The minimum budget is €175,000 per company/project. The projects must start in 2025 and end by June 30, 2028, at the latest.

INNOGLOBAL opens from May till June 2025. An international funding request (EUREKA funding request in case of CELTIC-NEXT) will be required before applying.

For the rest of the non-eligible regions, CDTI offers a mix of loan and grants under the “Proyectos de Cooperación Tecnológica Internacional” funding line.

CELTIC Spanish successful project 5G-PERFECTA

5G-PERFECTA project is a good example of CELTIC-NEXT success, which aim has been to develop the technology to assure the 5G service quality based on data processing, that is, to guarantee that the quality of 5G networks is aligned with the expectations of bandwidth, latency and other key performance indicators. The project has contributed to the analysis of the 5G performance, the supervision of 5G networks, technologies for monitoring 5G networks, supervision of services and applications as well as 5G monitoring and measurement devices.

The project has developed a 5G performance compliance testing assurance solution that calculates KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) to show the real behaviour of 5G network and services. In addition, 5G-PERFECTA has developed automated processes, tools and mechanisms ensuring 5G service quality based on data processing and analytics approaches, under two main project scenarios and six use cases. The 5G Network Performance scenario provides the performance monitoring information and includes the testbed and measurement scope for 5G network performance analysis. The 5G Quality Assurance scenario provides the quality of service monitoring information, including the time sensitive networking mechanisms, the deployment of critical services with performance guarantees and the QoS observability for 5G. The following figure shows the project scenarios and use cases.

In addition, 5G-PERFECTA has developed a monitoring platform to deliver real measurements over the new generation mobile networks, tested on a real infrastructure. These performance indicators are helping to determine the suitability of new mobile infrastructure, including 5G to support next generation applications in mobility.

The project, led by Minsait, has benefited greatly from a well-balanced consortium, involving 5G operators, vendors and system integrators with small and medium-sized enterprises and academia from Spain, Sweden, Türkiye, Portugal and Poland.

The overall quality is perceived as high objectively measured by the amount of valuable contributions outside the project group (86) to the technology related to 5G-PERFECTA, in which the main innovations have been transferred: 44 papers in most relevant international journals symposiums and conferences (IEEE ISCC, IEEE INFOCOM, JCOMSS, IEEE Access, IEEE Transactions, Elsevier Measurement, etc.); 10 contributions to standardization bodies (ITU-T, VQEG and TM Forum); 10 PhD theses & Master theses; and 22 other exhibitions, dissemination events and activities.

5G-PERFECTA project has received the CELTIC-NEXT Excellence Award for Services and Applications in 2024.

5G-PERFECTA wins the 2024 CELTIC-NEXT Excellence Award for Services and Applications.

Conclusion/Outlook

Spain has strongly supported CELTIC programme since it started in 2003. Telecommunications sector in Spain has an experienced and high added value community at national and international level.

CDTI strengthens its support to CELTIC programme with FEDER INNOGLOBAL Calls. Participants of CELTIC Spring Call 2025 can benefit from the FEDER INNGLOBAL Call 2025.

Further information

› CDTI website – https://www.cdti.es/en
› 5G-PERFECTA – http://www.5gperfecta.eu/

Operating CELTIC-NEXT as an EUREKA ECP Cluster means that the Office delivers an extensive portfolio of services to our ICT Community and to the EUREKA Network of National Funding and Innovation Agencies.

CELTIC-NEXT’s project calls:

The operation of a CELTIC NEXT call for bottom-up project proposals involves several specific actions:

The first action is to prepare for the call – this means preparing the support for the management of the calls and proposals in terms of Office human resources and system tools, from application preparation to evaluation and labelling. This includes:

• Announcing the call on the Cluster’s Website: https://www.celticnext.eu/
• Defining and opening the call portal: https://cluster-projects.eurestools.eu/index
• Updating the Brokerage tool: https://www.celticnext.eu/brokerage-tool/

Once the systems are prepared, the online or physical events for the call must be orchestrated:

• Launch event (online) – how and what to propose
• Brokerage event (physical or hybrid) – presentation of public authorities funding, proposers pitches and consortia participants matchmaking

The office staff facilitates these events by offering pitching preparation support before the event and running Consortium Building Sessions in the days following the brokerage and matchmaking.

The office must also allocate a set of qualified experts for the technical assessment of proposals. Should a proposal be labelled, its participants can expect help from the office for the negotiation with the different Public Authorities and coordination of preparation activities up to the project launch.

CELTIC-NEXT’s Flagships

These involve a similar process to the Project construction, but it is initiated in response to the convergence of industry demands and national interests.

CELTIC-NEXT’s Promotion Events

CELTIC-NEXT showcase events are planned, wherever possible, to maximise the exposure and value to the projects and the authorities. These are usually planned in coordination with other major events to ensure good audiences and to control costs.

CELTIC-NEXT’s Support to Projects:

CELTIC-NEXT oversees the running projects to ensure they are working to plan and can deliver the expected results. This is achieved by frequent interactions between the project officer and the project leader and several formal reviews (mid-term, final) during the project life.

Typically, a CELTIC-NEXT project can expect:

• Comprehensive support for reporting, dissemination and collaborative working through the CELTIC-NEXT tool set
• Assistance, coaching and monitoring support from the Project officer
• Advice and guidance from experts and project officers during the project’s lifecycle (on demand) and in particular at review times (by default)
• Simple processes for Project Change Request management, providing flexibility and resiliency to projects when plans need to change

CELTIC-NEXT provides also support for Dissemination activities to the project by inviting them to present at CELTIC-NEXT’s Events, nominating speakers and participations at international events like EUCNC, EGIS,… and highlighting the major achievement of the projects via CELTIC-NEXT’s media channels: LinkedIn, Newsletter, CELTIC News…

Figure 1: CELTIC-NEXT Tools Set

The number of calls per year and regularity

The CELTIC-NEXT community, in consultation with the national authorities have decided that their dynamic domain is best served by having two opportunities in the calendar year to present their project ideas for consideration. Accordingly, two bottom-up calls are organised each year, one in Spring (deadline end of April) and one in Autumn (deadline end of October). For these calls. proposers are free to define their project ambitions according to their ICT research interests and can submit them via our Online Project Portal.

In addition to bottom-up calls, CELTIC offers the opportunity to generate “Flagship” projects/calls at any time if there is an agreed interest. These special interest initiatives can emerge if the industry and PAs share a strong interest in collaborating on a Special Flagship initiative to address a key theme. The CELTIC office will facilitate the flagship by having an agreed submission date, which can differ from the above schedule by specific agreement with the involved PAs, and organising the review and project preparation process around this. These projects are usually in the range of several tens of million Euros for a 3–5-year duration.

Flagship projects are, by their nature, very successful because they are a balance of bottom-up and top-down approaches.

It is important to mention that CELTIC-NEXT operates exclusively thanks to the fees it collects from projects that got labelled and started. This is the only revenue source enabling all the aforementioned services. CELTIC-NEXT Office neither receives public funding from EUREKA Countries nor private money from its Core Group.

Figure 2: CELTIC-NEXT Calls Timeline

CELTIC historic flagship programme started with 100-Gigabit Ethernet Transport Technologies (100 GET), Safe and Secure European Routing (SASER), Secure Networking for a data center cloud in Europe(SENDATE) projects, and Accellerating digital transformation in Europe by Intelligent NETwork automation (AI-NET) flagship. The ramping-up Sustainable Technologies for Advanced Resilient and Energy-Efficient Networks (SUSTAINET) flagship is the successor of those highly successful flagship projects. This is a clear success track record. And they also create highly collaborative communities, as you can take from the AI-NET song ! Those flagship projects were and are still possible because Industry and National Funding Innovation Agencies jointly recognise(d) the absence of adequate funding support in addressing a particular area of the CELTIC-NEXT’s ICT Strategic and Innovation Road Map (SRIA).

Figure 1: Typical Flagship Characteristics

Preparing and launching a Flagship project requires a concerted approach between a core group of large industry players and a core group of public funding agencies. This small core team delimits the relevant R&D&I area of the flagship, the overall approximative budget envelope to be targeted, and the agenda for developing the project proposal. This is the first preparation phase, consisting of a top-down approach in terms of thematic area and budget envelope. Then, once this is designed, the core industrial consortium will open the flagship proposal to more participants, enabling a considerable number of industry players, SMEs, RTOs, and academics to join the consortium. This is the phase of bottom-up growth within the agreed SRIA area. This is also potentially a growth in terms of budget needs.

Due to the accrued number of participants (up to 100) and subtopics, the Flagship project is then organised around three to four subprojects and an umbrella project that contains all common cross-subproject topics. Another form of maintaining coherence for the horizontal topics is to have a common Work Package with joint tasks across the subprojects (also called vertical projects in the flagship jargon).

Once the horizontal and vertical project proposals are ready, they are submitted to CELTIC-NEXT and the Public Authorities like regular project proposals made in the two-yearly bottom-up calls. They must fulfil the same rules, evaluation criteria, and KPIs.

Flagships are a unique selling point of CELTIC-NEXT in the Eureka Cluster Programme (ECP). There is a strong demand from National Funding & Innovation Agencies to join either in the current topical area of our flagships or in other areas of our SRIA. We aim to reproduce that success in several of them, clearing streams of flagships.

Preparing flagships demands a high intensity of preparation work as they are like mini-programmes. This means that a strategy needs to be put in place to develop them in time and quality. As they target kind of European “funding” market failures, they need also to be well explained to gather the EUREKA national funding agencies support.

Recall of SUSTAINET high-level description: “In the midst of global crises and geopolitical challenges, Europe is charting its course towards a digital, sustainable future. However, with its share of the global ICT market declining, urgent actions are required to ensure technological sovereignty. This project addresses this multifaceted challenge by focusing on network resilience, energy efficiency, sustainability, high-performing end-to-end networks, and network security.

Achieving seamless interconnection of digital systems, essential for future high-performance communication networks, demands research in ICT hardware and control software. The transition towards a “Digital Society” necessitates increased dependence on ICT for power supply control, emphasising the need for resilient, scalable networking technologies combined with the support of new services such as cognitive and complete context awareness.

Network resilience is paramount in such interconnected networking for critical infrastructures and requires new concepts to ensure communication continuity during errors or disasters. Such networking will also call for secure networks with robust cybersecurity measures to combat evolving threats.

Furthermore, network sustainability is vital for realising a climate-neutral future. Telecommunications networks must prioritise connectivity and serve as platforms for a sustainable society. Operators must adapt to fluctuating renewable energy availability, transitioning from consumers to prosumers in the energy market.

Collaborative R&D efforts are imperative to achieve these objectives and regain technological sovereignty. Government support and industry initiatives must converge to drive innovation in key technologies, fostering industrial cooperation and joint R&D initiatives.

This project proposes a holistic approach, integrating research in frictionless network performance, resilience, security, and sustainability to propel Europe towards a sustainable, technologically sovereign future.”

How does it translate into a tangible project?

Here are some KPIs for SUSTAINET :

• 8 Countries at labelling time, over 10 now, with some still joining during the ramp-up phase
• Over 90 participants of all types, Telcos, Large Industry, SMEs, RTOs, Academia
• Over 70 M€ budget,
• Over 500 FTEs, split into 3 vertical projects and one umbrella set of horizontal tasks
• 36 months duration (indicative depending on funding decisions timing)
• High expected impact and visibility in standards & markets

Figure 2: CELTIC-NEXT New Flagship: SUSTAINET

Further information

• SUSTAINET flagship information: https://www.celticnext.eu/project-sustainet/
• AI-NET flagship song video: https://youtu.be/SCz-BA9ja5E?si=AolQIcYkJ9EgxLLf