The LINKS Foundation – Leading Innovation & Knowledge for Society is a non-profit private Foundation founded in 2018 with the aim to boost the interaction between research and the business world towards the internationalization of the local socio-economic system. LINKS promotes, conducts, and strengthens innovation and research projects processes, improving products implementation as well as the study of new approaches and models. LINKS is the result of the merge of two distinguished research and innovation institutions: ISMB (Istituto superiore Mario Boella), focusing on ICT, and SiTI (Istituto Superiore sui Sistemi Territoriali per l’Innovazione), focusing on Territorial Systems and Smart Cities. Similarly, to ISMB and SITI, this Foundation has been founded by Compagnia di San Paolo and Politecnico di Torino.
LINKS relies on technological and process competences of around 160 researchers working in close cooperation with companies, academia and Public Administration. It is organized in Research Areas focused on core sectors of ICT that are capable of managing the whole value chain, from basic technology up to its practical implementation (proof-of-concept). Additionally, LINKS extends its activities to facilitate innovation, employing its technical excellences and results, into domains that are interdisciplinary by nature and aligned with the priority themes of the European agenda, such as Energy, Mobility, Industry and Circular Economy.
The Foundation is involved in several industrial cooperation activities with both large enterprises and SMEs, as well as in various higher-education initiatives in partnership with academic institutions.
LINKS will contribute to INCIT-EV with skilled and experienced personnel whom were earlier part of the SITI Logistics and Transport (LOT) division and part of the ISMB Pervasive Technologies (PerT) research area and Smart Energy Program. LOT deals with transport planning and modelling and provides public and private bodies with studies, applied researches and know-how to support decision making in transport planning and governance and foster the sustainable development of cities and regions. Its focus is on sustainable mobility services development through participatory processes that engage users and stakeholders.The PerT Research Area studies and develops technologies enabling the paradigm of IoT, Cyber Physical Systems as well as distributed smart complex systems. PerT has been involved in a number of EU, regional and industrial projects focused on such topics. More specifically, PerT has an expertise in the design and development of distributed, scalable IoT architectures, interoperability solutions being adopted in different application domains including energy and smart city, distributed intelligence enabling cooperative tasks, data analysis solutions promoting predictive approaches (adopted in energy and industry scenarios). The main function of the Smart Energy program is to support LINKS in new research activities on the use of the ICT applied to the Energy domain. These research activities are carried on through LINKS’ research areas and particular attention is, at the present, devoted to how ICT may bring new ways of managing energy distribution through smart grids, how to support efficient active demand methodologies, to study user profile loads clustering, algorithms for distributed constrained energy optimization, etc.).

LINKS will provide major contribution to WP2 and WP5, it will lead WP6 and will support WP8 (with a focus on Turin’s pilot), WP9 and WP10 activities.
Within WP2, LINKS will lead Task 2.1, Task 2.2 and Task 2.5. In Task 2.1, LINKS will contribute analysing FCD (Floating Car Data) to estimate users’ mobility patterns and parking habits; in Task 2.2 engaging and involving Italian and local Stakeholders and users; it will contributing to Task 2.3 with the implementation of discrete choice models (DCM) in the use case cities to identify and assess the importance of the main users’ choice criteria/drivers and concerns; LINKS will contribute to Task 2.4 supporting BitBrain in the Bio signal and acceptance studies in the Torino Pilot case; finally in Task 2.5 elaborating strategies to foster electric mobility and recommendations for setting up a common EU methodology to assess users perspective regarding Electric mobility and charging infrastructure.
LINKS will also contribute to WP5 in Task 5.1, Task 5.2, and Task 5.4. In Task 5.1, LINKS will support the CIM definition by exploiting its knowledge of cross-domain interoperability and mapping among heterogeneous communication and data management standards. In Task 5.2, LINKS will support the definition of ICT components and interfaces required to integrate with the DSS (WP6) as well as 3rd party services. Besides, LINKS will support the integration and the interoperability within Turin’s pilot. In Task 5.4, LINKS will contribute to the development of connectors to relevant systems and external data sources following the requirements defined in previous tasks. Besides, LINKS will implement the connectors to enable interoperability within Turin’s pilot as defined in T5.2.
LINKS will lead WP6 supporting the project in developing the INCIT-EV marketplace made of a Decision Support System to perform scenarios evaluation to identify and address technical and socioeconomic issues for a smooth, rapid and sustainable user-centric EV and CPs infrastructures development and a Service and Application Layers for providing to users the best user-centric charging experience. LINKS will lead Task 6.1 in charge of gathering all the necessary functional and non-functional requirements, will support Task 6.2 on the KPI elicitation, it will lead Task 6.3 where the major software and library modules of the DSS will be developed. LINKS will also support Task 6.4 in particular with the definition of Smart Charging strategies designed for the Turin use case. It will support ATOS in the activities of Task 6.5 where the different modules and apps will be orchestrated to build the final project market-place and finally it will contribute in Task 6.6. with the testing and validation phase of the work.
LINKS will support WP8 for the ICT related aspects regarding the Turin pilot.
LINKS will also support WP9, contributing to IPR review and management, replication analysis and pre-commercial roadmap, and WP10, contributing to Dissemination and public communication actions.