RAINBOW’s impact assessment is our effort to prove the applicability, usability, effectiveness and value of the RAINBOW integrated framework in industrial, real-life trustworthy services, applications and scenarios, demonstrating the RAINBOW artefacts, methodologies and services under pragmatic conditions against the project’s use cases.
The “Project Impact Assessment” deliverable concludes the work in Work Package 7 “Dissemination, Exploitation and Communication” and by extension, the RAINBOW project as a whole. Collecting input from almost all Work Packages of the project and from various partners, it highlights the most prominent achievements of RAINBOW project during the 36 months of project duration between 2020 and 2022. The deliverable will be uploaded, once published, to the public deliverables section of the website.
Initially, we laid down the impact assessment approach, so as to define and employ a pertinent technique to comprehend RAINBOW’s realized impact. Inspired by an extremely versatile strategic framework, called “The Three Horizons Methodology”, we look for specific impact along three process stages: “research output”, “knowledge transfer” and “community benefit”.
Furthermore, we explore the impact RAINBOW has towards the strategic goals of the Objective ICT-15-2019 and discuss the means through which this impact was achieved, and to which extend. Objective ICT-15-2019 called for “competitive cloud solutions based on advanced cloud platforms, services, cloud-based software and data applications. Furthermore, such solutions should also address advanced security, data protection, performance, resilience and energy-efficiency requirements to respond to the future digitisation needs of industry and the public sector”.
Getting started with the impact assessment stages, we turn our attention towards the results of the project’s technical work, in a way that sheds light on the impact this work has on the strategic objectives of the call. In parallel to that, we sketch the added value and present the advantages and disadvantages the developed solution has on three advanced fog use cases, i.e. the three demonstrators described in the project. Interesting webinars showcasing the deployment and use of RAINBOW at the three demonstrators have been uploaded to the project’s YouTube channel.
The focus is then turned towards certain community benefits, from contributions to standardisation initiatives through the provision of open source code (to the Eclipse IoT community and to Linux Foundation’s Centaurus project), to the open sourcing of the majority of RAINBOW modules, to the alignment with the architectural principles of OpenFog Consortium (rebranded as the Industry IoT Consortium in August 2021).
As a last means to measure impact, we document the efforts to transfer the produced know-how to interested stakeholders. Apart from recorded webinars, dissemination efforts were also fruitful with 25 Scientific Publications, Conference and Journal Papers. Furthermore, we exploited our website and our social media accounts (with almost 1200 total followers and over 1200 posts published) to promote our communication material. The university partners held two Hackathon activities in Nicosia (CY) and Thessaloniki (GR) creation of user manual and adoption guidelines. Finally, we have drafted the online documentation of the RAINBOW Platform.
