The COP-PILOT project addresses a pressing need in the rapidly evolving edge computing landscape: transforming fragmented infrastructure and siloed services into a unified, intelligent, and secure collaborative platform. As industries increasingly adopt private edge systems powered by IoT and advanced 5G connectivity, there is enormous potential to unlock real-time intelligence and automation. However, current deployments fall short of delivering the full promise of edge innovation, largely due to limited interoperability, low visibility into the data plane, and insufficient orchestration capabilities.

COP-PILOT envisions a Collaborative Open Platform for cross-sector orchestration that enables seamless integration across service domains. Leveraging a novel LLM-based user interface, AI-driven SLA preservation, and encrypted, programmable integration fabrics, the platform introduces next-generation automation and intelligence at scale. By aligning with emerging standards such as ETSI OSL, TFS, ZSM, MEC, and CIM, COP-PILOT builds a standards-compliant foundation for sustainable innovation. The solution will be tested in four large-scale pilot clusters across Europe, covering real-world applications in energy, agriculture, smart cities, manufacturing, logistics, and mobility. Beyond technical performance, the project aims to demonstrate tangible market potential, environmental sustainability, and social impact, fostering a new era of collaborative edge ecosystems.

Funded under the EU Horizon Europe programme, COP-PILOT brings together 47 partners from 11 countries, coordinating efforts across four major piloting clusters and delivering a total of 17 use cases. These clusters span:

• Sweden (Norrbotten) – Business integration in mining (4 use cases)
• Spain (Valencia) – Sustainable mobility for smart city environments, including campus, industrial park, and port (3 use cases)
• Greece:
  • Preveza & Patras (Cluster 3A) – Grid reliability in renewable-rich energy networks (3 use cases)
  • Central Macedonia (Cluster 3B) – AgriTech Transformation and Sustainability Initiative (4 use cases)
• Germany & Spain (Cluster 4) – Integrated IoT solutions for sustainability in agriculture, recycling, and manufacturing (3 use cases)

Together, these clusters represent a truly pan-European testbed for piloting future-ready, edge-enabled, cross-sector services that will shape the digital infrastructure of tomorrow.

The Role of FIWARE

FIWARE’s contribution underpins COP-PILOT’s innovation efforts in standard-based, interoperable IoT data management. Leveraging the FIWARE Context Broker and components aligned with the ETSI NGSI-LD standard, the project ensures seamless integration and interoperability across heterogeneous Internet of Things (IoT) infrastructures. This enables a unified approach to representing and exchanging context information, critical for managing distributed intelligence across the IoT-edge-core continuum. By adopting and extending Smart Data Models, COP-PILOT facilitates semantic interoperability and reusability of data across sectors. FIWARE’s modular interfaces and open APIs allow flexible, vendor-neutral integration of sensors, robotic devices, and third-party systems, supporting the project’s ambition to deploy scalable, intelligent services across collaborative domains without vendor lock-in.

More information: https://cop-pilot.eu/