Intelligent, distributed, human-centered and trustworthy IoT environments

2026-07-22

The traditional cloud centric IoT has clear limitations, e.g. unreliable connectivity, privacy concerns, or high round-trip times. IntellIoT overcomes these challenges in order to enable NG IoT applications. IntellIoT’s objectives aim at developing a framework for intelligent IoT environments that execute semi-autonomous IoT applications, which evolve by keeping the human-in-the-loop as an integral part of the system. Such intelligent IoT environments enable a suite of novel use cases. IntellIoT focuses on: Agriculture, where a tractor is semi-autonomously operated in conjunction with drones. Healthcare, where patients are monitored by sensors to receive advice and interventions from virtual advisors. Manufacturing, where highly automated plants are shared by multiple tenants who utilize machinery from third-party vendors. In all cases a human expert plays a key role in controlling and teaching the AI-enabled systems. The following 3 key features of IntellIoT’s approach are highly relevant for the work programme as they address the call’s challenges: (1) Human-defined autonomy is established through distributed AI running on intelligent IoT devices under resource-constraints, while users teach and refine the AI via tactile interaction (with AR/VR). (2) De-centralised, semi-autonomous IoT applications are enabled by self-aware agents of a hypermedia-based multi-agent system, defining a novel architecture for the NG IoT. It copes with interoperability by relying on W3C WoT standards and enabling automatic resolution of incompatibility constraints. (3) An efficient, reliable computation & communication infrastructure is powered by 5G and dynamically manages and optimizes the usage of network and compute resources in a closed loop. Integrated security assurance mechanisms provide trust and DLTs are made accessible under resource constraints to enable smart contracts and show transparency of performed actions.

Germany, France, Denmark, Finland, Austria, Greece, Netherlands, Cyprus, Switzerland

2026-03-01