Bridging Domains in Large-scale Complex and Critical Systems, 2026 Ed.

Kurzfassung

We are going through a period of time where, the rapid ascent of AI, as well as political and climatic uncertainties, is calling us to reassess the structure of Europe. Especially what are our differences that we can build on to provide strengths for a valuable and secure European future. As part of a yearly series of workshops, the TechNexus Programme hosted FORECAST and STEADINESS during the HiPEAC 2026 conference in Kraków. We drew together diverse expertise from academia, industry and policy for considering the technology bridging challenges at functional and system levels for complex and critical systems. Raising the visibility of technology integration challenges across expert domains and their solutions represents a driving goal of the community developing around the TechNexus Programme. Advancing how we combine technologies facilitates technology transfer, and in particular nourishes our local technology markets. Readers are encouraged to contact the authors if interested in contributing to building the voice around this topic. An overview of the two workshops is provided in this white paper, including the topics presented, the discussions and six resulting global recommendations. Complex and critical systems are the result of drawing together a multitude of expert domains, including influences from the market and product-line, technical advances from functional properties, system-level functionalities, enabling technologies like AI and IoT and of course the aggregating tools and techniques for bridging these domains. There is still much untapped value here in relation to automation. However, the TechNexus Programme seeks to help unlock the level above this with respect to blending of technologies and knowledge integration, opening up new dimensions of value generation. Further to this, technology integrations themselves are technologies, all the way to, for instance, railway implementations, and these infrastructure technologies represent markets for all the technologies contained within - so how we support infrastructure technologies has quite a profound impact on our future economies related to national infrastructure across many domains including manufacturing, transport, medicine, and robotics. There are not only the mechanisms within a system product, or applied R&D to consider, but very likely a need to rethink our approaches for organising, assessing, and supporting development of technology and knowledge integrations, where breakthrough advances are reliant on blending cross-domain and specialist expertise from diverse backgrounds.