FORA—Fog Computing for Robotics and Industrial Automation was a European Training Network (ETN), which funded and trained 15 PhD candidates in the area of Fog Computing, during the period 2017-2021. Fog Computing, also sometimes called Edge Computing, brings the Cloud “closer to the ground”, to the edge of the network. FORA was an interdisciplinary, international, intersectoral network that trained the next generation of researchers in Fog Computing with applicability to industrial automation and manufacturing.
Contact:
- Coordinator: Prof. Paul Pop, DTU Compute
- Director: Dr. Bahram Zarrin (Until September 2020)
- Director: Dr. Mohammadreza Barzegaran, DTU Compute (Since October 2020)
We are at the beginning of a new industrial revolution, Industry 4.0, which will only become a reality through the convergence of Operational and Information Technologies (OT & IT), and this convergence will be achieved through Fog Computing.
The funding came from European Union’s Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA) European Training Networks (ETN) instrument part of the Horizon 2020 research program. The consortium was formed of 4 universities and 3 companies from Sweden, Denmark, Austria and Germany, and had associated partners also in Silicon Valley, USA.
The training of future researchers was achieved via a research program focusing on: a reference system architecture for Fog Computing; resource management mechanisms and middleware for deploying mixed-criticality applications in the Fog; safety and security assurance; service-oriented application modeling and real-time machine learning.
FORA’s researchers received integrated training across key areas (computer science, electrical engineering, control engineering, industrial automation, applied mathematics and data science) necessary to fully realize the potential of Fog Computing for Industry 4.0 and had moved between academic and industrial environments to promote interdisciplinary and intersectoral learning.