ESSENTIAL project

The project also establishes a dedicated CCAM data framework and a Software-Defined Vehicle (SDV) lifecycle approach to support middleware reuse, secure over-the-air (OTA) updates and continuous monitoring mechanisms designed to ensure long-term safety and trustworthiness of Edge-AI-enabled functions.

Co-funded by the Horizon Europe Research and Innovation Action, ESSENTIAL runs from November 2026 to October 2029 and brings together a consortium of 10 partners. Its overall objective is to develop and validate trustworthy, efficient and safe Edge-AI building blocks for real-time CCAM functionalities through optimized AI models, distributed computing architectures and continuous monitoring tools.

Addressing key challenges for future CCAM systems

ESSENTIAL addresses several challenges associated with the deployment of AI-driven CCAM functions. These include the need for a foundational rethinking of AI development pipelines, ensuring the trustworthiness of AI at the edge, strengthening European sovereignty in automotive hardware and software computing platforms, improving data quality and intelligent data exploitation, enabling hardware-software co-design for AI models, and supporting continuous development, validation and monitoring processes.

To tackle these challenges, the project focuses on five key areas:

• Developing a certifiable methodology for safe, cybersecure and trustworthy Edge-AI in CCAM.
• Creating and validating hardware-aware AI models to improve latency, power efficiency and throughput.
• Establishing a Software-Defined Vehicle lifecycle framework for deployment, updating and maintenance of Edge-AI models.
• Creating the ESSENTIAL Edge AI Data Ecosystem.
• Integrating the complete CCAM functional chain from perception to actuation.

Expected outcomes

The project is expected to deliver a comprehensive Edge-AI technology stack for CCAM applications, including:

• A methodology for trustworthy AI development.
• An Edge-AI library for edge-deployed models.
• Real-time monitoring tools for Edge-AI systems.
• A co-design toolkit for hardware-aware AI optimization.
• A lifecycle framework supporting continuous assurance.
• An integrated validation platform and demonstrators for CCAM testing and validation.

IDIADA's contribution

Applus+ IDIADA contributes to ESSENTIAL through its Electronics and ADAS teams. Within the project’s perception-related use case, IDIADA supports the definition of use cases, requirements and validation planning; the development of continuous integration and secure deployment pipelines; benchmarking, hardware-in-the-loop simulation and resilience validation activities; and the integration and evaluation of demonstrators.

IDIADA is also actively involved in project impact activities, including communication, scientific and industrial dissemination, stakeholder engagement, international cooperation, and exploitation and intellectual property management activities.