A new report on Cloud-Edge-IoT assets and patterns has just been published, bringing together contributions from CEI-Sphere, O-CEI and nine other European initiatives working on architecture.
The report is the result of work carried out in the High Level Architecture task force of the AIOTI working group on standardisation, together with CEI-Sphere's own Task Force 1 on Architecture. It is the fourth in a series of AIOTI architecture reports, after earlier publications on integrating IoT and edge computing in data spaces, on digital twins in data spaces, and on a computing continuum reference architecture released in May 2025.
Why assets matter
The first half of the report deals with a question that becomes unavoidable once projects move from prototypes to deployment: how do you keep track of what you have built, so that someone else can reuse it?
With more than 43 billion devices now connected to the internet, and CEI environments that are heterogeneous, distributed and often resource constrained, the components that make up a solution are numerous and rarely documented in a consistent way. Add AI agents and digital twins to the picture, which can sit at cloud, edge or device level depending on the deployment, and the number of things that need describing grows quickly.
The report treats these components as assets, in the sense used by established IT asset management standards, and argues that Europe needs a dedicated framework for managing them. It draws directly on O-CEI's work, which has published a specification for an open platform to manage blueprint products, along with the vocabulary that goes with it: blueprints, blueprint products, digital assets and digital asset registries.
Readers of our previous publications will recognise the framing used here. Building on CEI-Sphere's work, O-CEI has applied the Hourglass Model to CEI asset ecosystems, mapping the stakeholders involved (policy makers, asset developers, deployment service providers and deployers) against the capabilities needed (asset lifecycle management, deployment documentation and deployment management through asset spaces, sometimes called marketplaces), with asset deployment itself sitting in the narrow centre.
The report closes this section with a list of the standards a future framework should build on, covering assets, asset assurance and governance, as well as domain specific standards such as those used in building information modelling.
Eight architecture patterns, described the same way
The second half of the report collects architecture patterns from across the European landscape and describes each of them using the same template, taken from ISO/IEC 30141.
It starts with SGAM, the Smart Grid Architecture Model, which turns out to be the common reference point for much of the energy work. It then presents patterns from the RESONANCE, PARMENIDES, ECLIPSE-DIGITAL, HEDGE-IoT and HERITWIN projects, from CTAG's DRIVING project on digital twins and AI for sustainable manufacturing, and from two Eclipse open-source initiatives, aeriOS and VOStack, which came out of the aerOS and NEPHELE MetaOS projects.
The range is deliberately broad. HERITWIN applies its pattern to cultural heritage digital twins across five pilots, from a Norwegian canal to archaeological XR documentation. aeriOS illustrates its federated orchestration model with computer vision detecting container damage in the port of Limassol. What the patterns have in common is more interesting than what separates them: nearly all of them reference other patterns, and several reference each other.
What comes next
The report makes three recommendations. The first is to gather the rationale needed to develop a standard on CEI asset management within ISO/IEC JTC1/SC41. The second is to sharpen how patterns are described, separating the essential features from what depends on a particular implementation. The third is to work towards a sustainable pattern repository, so that patterns can be found, reused and kept in step with one another.
| Attachment | Size |
|---|---|
| AIOTI-Report-Cloud-Edge-IoT-assets-and-patterns_260915-Final-version.pdf | 4.19 MB |