About Harmony
Part of the European Commission's Horizon Europe Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA), the Industrial Doctorate
programme HARMONY: Innovating New Space Frontiers: Harmonised Federated And Fractionated Systems Unlocking Fresh
Perspectives For Satellite Services has opened an immediate opportunity for well-funded PhD positions in the area of space
networks exploiting emerging constellations with focus on the underlying architectures, signal processing and antenna
technologies.
Structured around a major European satellite manufacturer (Thales Alenia Space), HARMONY comes as a follow-up to the
REVOLVE project (https://revolve.eps.hw.ac.uk/), where 7 MSCA graduates developed cutting edge antenna technologies that
have led to new products and approaches that have been adopted by the industry. A further success indicator for REVOLVE is
that all 7 researchers were absorbed into the European space sector at the end of the project (4 in large integrators and 3 in
SMEs).
The explosive demand for truly global fixed and mobile connectivity, navigation services, and climate monitoring, has in the past decade transformed our day to day use of space. Nowadays, a combination of recent technological innovations enabling higher level of digitisation, miniaturisation and reusability coupled with regulatory reform and the rapid commercialisation of space missions - a development often referred to as New Space - are driving rapid changes in the space sector. As the space infrastructure rapidly rumps up, the next disruptive evolution will manifestly come from the seamless and flexible integration of heterogenous spaceborne assets. A central piece of the 6G vision aims at integrating terrestrial and non-terrestrial networks in a single access architecture with sufficient flexibility, smartness and capacity to ensure truly global and reliable coverage as well as cost efficient rollout of services in the absence of costly optical fibres. Space systems have also unique features and heritage for numerous other services with transformative potential, e.g. Earth observation as well as position navigation and timing (PNT) that have traditionally been dominated by governmental investments and presently largely remain in silos. A primary driver of HARMONY is the removal of barriers across different space missions, services and actors in order to enable disruptive services that reach widely across societal needs and thereby complement the current 6G roadmaps. With the vision of fulfilling the New Space potential across diverse use cases, the aim of HARMONY is to underpin the broad harmonisation of spaceborne assets in a sustainable multi-mission ecosystem that will propel transformative innovation in services by exploiting the unique advantages of the space environment.
Harmony project presentation video
System Engineering, Signal Processing and Antenna Technologies: that's what our researchers are focusing on in the HARMONY project!
We are thrilled to present the introduction video of our Horizon Europe industrial doctoral network!
An ambitious industrial doctoral network
To accomplish its mission, HARMONY brings to fore a vertically integrated research programme in an industrial doctoral network for 9 PhD candidates structured around two innovative architectural satellite system concepts, namely; Fractionation, where the functions traditionally performed by a single monolithic satellite are distributed among a cluster of modules interconnected by inter-satellite links (ISLs), and; Federation, where a cluster of satellites, each with full functional capabilities, exploit ISLs to dynamically share unused and available resources (e.g. memory, data processors or downlink capacity) to improve performance and efficiency. Some of the objectives and research challenges of HARMONY are illustrated in the following figure:
In addition to the conduction of a well-defined project for each HARMONY researcher, the PhD training programme is complemented by traditional academic training as well as a variety of personalised and network-wide initiatives.
