The overall strategy of the work plan for the I-MECH project is to ensure that scientific and research based innovation and applicability and exploitability are effectively blended. The consortium’s experience in successful innovative interdisciplinary projects at the European and national levels, as well as the best practices identified from relevant projects, has led to the conclusion that an evolutionary approach to project implementation will allow it to reach the best results throughout the following traits:

•  Active engagement of the stakeholders into the process of the specification, design and evaluation of the proposed technological solutions.
• An agile iterative development approach is followed in order to capture valuable feedback from the end users about the I-MECH technologies from the early stages of the project and to the final refinement of the concept suite.

The project is structured into 8 work packages:

WP1 Project management

WP2 Business requirements and reference system architecture

WP3 Instrumentation Layer design and development

WP4 Control Layer design and development

WP5 System Behavior Layer design and interfaces

WP6 Implementation and integration of I-MECH platform

WP7 Pilots and demonstrators

WP8 Dissemination, exploitation, communication activities

The project’s objectives will be accomplished through two main phases. Requirements and specifications will be produced for all project domains, innovative work methodologies and technological building blocks will be developed, definition of the pilots will be finalized, and feedback from the first evaluation of the I-MECH architecture will be collected during phase 1 (months 1-26, WP1, WP2, WP3, WP4, WP5 & WP6). The specifications and the overall conceptual framework will be revised, I-MECH demo and pilots will be developed and enhanced with advanced capabilities, work methodologies turn to best practices and innovative work guidelines, I-MECH solutions will be thoroughly tested, while the final evaluation via use cases and the overall project’s evaluation will take place in phase 2 (months 18-36, WP6, WP7).