PISAI – A New Erasmus+ Innovation Alliance Coordinated by TU Wien
I am extremely happy to share that our proposal PISAI – Phygital Innovation for Sustainable Artificial Intelligence has been selected for funding as an Erasmus+ Alliance for Innovation!
PISAI will be coordinated by TU Wien, with me serving as the project coordinator. The project will run for 36 months with a project volume of almost €1.5 million.
This is a particularly exciting result as the Erasmus+ Alliances for Education and Enterprises are highly competitive European projects. In the 2026 call, only 18 projects across Europe were selected for funding, sharing an Erasmus+ budget of €25 million.
More information about the funding scheme is available on the EU Funding & Tenders Portal.
PISAI – Phygital Innovation for Sustainable Artificial Intelligence #
AI is increasingly moving beyond purely digital applications and becoming embedded in physical products and socio-technical systems. Designing such phygital products requires professionals who can combine expertise in AI, engineering, product design, sustainability, and lifecycle management.
PISAI aims to build a European education and innovation ecosystem for exactly these skills. The project will connect higher education, higher vocational education and training, SMEs, and other innovation actors to develop new learning pathways for designing, prototyping, and validating AI-enabled physical products in a human-centred, responsible, and environmentally sustainable way.
A particularly interesting aspect for me is that Model-Driven Engineering will form one of the technological and methodological foundations of the project. Together with Open Educational Resources, Artificial Intelligence, and Product Lifecycle Management, modeling will help learners reason systematically about products, AI components, data flows, processes, stakeholders, and sustainability constraints.
PISAI will turn these ideas into open educational resources, personalized learning pathways, Living Labs, challenge-based learning scenarios, digital tools, and micro-credentials, and validate them across higher education, vocational education, and SME settings throughout Europe.
A European Alliance #
PISAI brings together a broad European consortium of universities, higher vocational education providers, companies, and innovation organisations. TU Wien coordinates the alliance, with partners including the University of L'Aquila, University of Pisa, Kühne Logistics University, University of Mannheim, COMAU, MIDOR Digital Services, European Entrepreneurs CEA-PME, and several vocational education and innovation partners.
In total, the PISAI network comprises 11 beneficiary organisations and 13 associated partners, connecting education and industry across Europe.
Winning and coordinating a European project of this scale is a major milestone for me and our team at TU Wien. I am particularly excited that PISAI allows us to bring together several topics that have become central to my research over the last years: model-driven engineering, artificial intelligence, sustainability, and the transfer of research into education and industrial practice.
A huge thank you to all our partners who contributed to developing the proposal. I am very much looking forward to the next three years and to building PISAI together!