First report on validation and dissemination activities

This deliverable reports the progress of the validation and dissemination activities of TrialsNet project that are in charge of Work Package 6 (WP6) "Validation & Dissemination".

The WP6 covers many transversal activities such as the management of the trials, the technical validation and assessment of the results coming from the trials activities, the analysis of the societal and business aspects on the basis of identified Key Values (KVs), the dissemination and standardization activities, and the exploitation of the project's results. On such basis, WP6 covers a crucial role across all the technical WPs of the project through the interaction with the domain WPs (i.e., WP3, WP4 and WP5) to define common Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and Key Values Indicators (KVIs) frameworks and the corresponding assessment methodologies for the use cases, as well as with WP2 for what concern the specific KPIs and KVIs related to the platform and network solutions that will be deployed in the different clusters. A coherent definition of the KPIs and KVIs is crucial for the validation of all the use cases, also the ones proposed in the Open Call, managed in WP7.

WP6 is also responsible to interact with the SNS-JU program at different levels including joint dissemination activities and program representations. Furthermore, synergies with the relevant 6G-IA and European Community groups are investigated, with possible co-organization of events.

In the context of the activities related to the technical definition and assessment methods for the KPIs, starting from deliverables D3.1 [1], D4.1 [2] and D5.1 [3], the WP6 analyzed all the KPIs defined in the different use cases in order to define a common terminology to use as a reference for the next phases of the project's activities. As a result, this deliverable identifies a set of 18 different KPIs divided in the following categories: capacity, latency, compute, availability/reliability, and localization. Further interactions between the concerned WPs (including WP2) will be carried out to consolidate such KPIs in the different use cases as well as to identify (if necessary) additional ones.

Concerning the activities on KVIs, this deliverable provides a common framework for their definition and analysis, that is required to share a coherent validation approach in the whole project. The framework will be adopted by each use case to define KVs, the corresponding KVIs, and related (technological) enablers. The relevant domains for KVs have been identified according to the Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) societal, economical and environmental areas, under the common umbrella of sustainability. Furthermore, the Technologies, Markets, Organizations and Governance (TMOG) framework is introduced as part of the KVs assessment methodology across the UCs of the project. This work will also help to address the business aspects and related impacts.

One innovation introduced by TrialsNet in the context of the use cases design, is the adoption of the so-called Design Thinking+ (DT+) methodology, consisting in a human-centered design process that will be adopted for the correct definition of KVs and therefore the design of the corresponding use cases. With respect to traditional Design Thinking, this deliverable defines the Design Thinking+ by the introduction of a new step, denoted as "map", that identifies business constraints, user constraints, technology constraints, and KV constraints, and allows to better address the specific requirements of each use case. The proposed methodology is adopted in the definition of the KVs for some of the use cases in which the final users can be actually involved in their design process.

Finally, this deliverable collects the dissemination, publication and standardization activities occurred in this first period of the project. In particular, despite the initial phase of the project, many important dissemination activities have been performed, including the participation at EuCNC (European Conference on Networks and Communications) & 6G Summit 2023 with a booth in which some live demos have been already shown.