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Project acronym: ENACT

ENACT develops cutting-edge techniques and technology solutions to realise a Cognitive Computing Continuum (CCC) that can address the needs for optimal (edge and Cloud) resource management and dynamic scaling, elasticity, and portability of hyper-distributed data-intensive applications. At infrastructure level, the project brings visibility to distributed edge and Cloud resources by developing Dynamic Graph Models capable of capturing and visualising the real-time and historic status information, connectivity types, dependencies, energy consumption etc. from diverse edge and Cloud resources. The graph models are used by AI (Graph Neural Networks - GNN) models and Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) agents to suggest the optimal deployment configurations for hyper distributed applications considering their specific needs. The AI (GNN and DRL) models are packaged as an intelligent decision-making engine that can replace the scheduling component of open-source solutions such as KubeEdge. This will enable realtime and predictive management of distributed infrastructure and applications. To take full advantage of the potential (compute, storage, energy efficiency etc) opportunities in the CCC, ENACT will develop an innovative Application Programming Model (APM). The APM will support the development of distributed platform agnostic applications, capable of self-determining their optimal deployment and optimal execution configurations while taking advantage of diverse resources in the CCC. An SDK to develop APMbased distributed applications will be developed. Moreover, services for automatic (zero-touch provisioning-based) resource configuration and (telemetry) data collections are developed to help design and update dynamic graph models. ENACT CCC solutions will be validated in 3 use-cases with challenging resource and application requirements. International collaboration is planned as Japan Productivity Center has committed to support with knowledge sharing.

Cognitive systems are at their core, highly adaptive, quickly adjusting to the digital transformation strategy of companies as they evolve and change over time. Such (cognitive) systems bring specific needs and expectations to the underlying infrastructure, which emphasise the importance of Cognitive Compute Continuum (CCC) that can support handling/processing of big data from multiple sources, getting real-time insight from large volumes of data, providing personalised experience to the target users based on the real-time insight, automation of routine tasks for greater efficiency of the overall system, and performing predictive maintenance of the resources to reduce downtime or unexpected issues. ENACT performs research and development in both of these areas (i.e., Cognitive Systems and CCC) to support the needs of highly demanding applications, such as those brought in by the 3 use-cases.