The oCPS – ITN is an Innovative Training Network funded by the European Commission through its Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions and brings together universities, research centres and companies from different countries worldwide to train a new generation of researchers. Concretely, 15 PhD students receive funding through this programme for a duration of 36 months within the 48 months project duration to pursue their PhD at research institutions and industry partners and having secondments in the other sector respectively. The project started November 1st 2015 and our 15 ESRs (Early Stage Researchers, PhD Students) are starting to work at the respective institutions after the initial recruitment phase from spring 2016 on (depending on each ones individual situation). They will meet on a regular basis for training and networking events, starting from September 2016. This will lead to a close collaboration between all involved institutions and a regular exchange of information. The main objective of the Platform-aware Model-driven Optimization of Cyber-Physical Systems (oCPS) program is to form a multi-disciplinary research and education network bringing together all disciplines relevant for CPS to form a scientific basis to (i) develop model-driven design techniques for CPS and (ii) introduce platform-awareness in the design trajectories. Such techniques should allow dealing with tradeoffs towards cost-effective, quality-driven, reliable design of the CPS of the future. The program aims to train a generation of young researchers in cross-disciplinary thinking and deliver industrially validated tool chains. We bring together the state of the practice through six key industrial players, including SMEs, and the state of the art through four top universities and one research institute across Europe.