Manufacturing and logistics companies are subject to unforeseen events that disrupt the supply chain, causing production slowdowns, reduced output, and increased costs, making it difficult to meet customer demand. To mitigate these risks, manufacturers must build resilience across entire value chains. NARRATE will develop a sophisticated tool using AI, Digital Twin, and IoT technologies allowing end-to-end visibility and control over supply chain operations to monitor and predict potential disruptions, enabling supply chains to achieve improved resilience. The Intelligent Manufacturing Custodian (IMC) will leverage data from various production sources to enable proactive decision-making and act as a nerve centre for a supply-chain network, providing real-time monitoring and coordination of intelligent production processes and logistics. Integrating an IMC into a supply-chain will evolve its operations into Smart Manufacturing Network (SMN): a connected and self-orchestrated ecosystem linked end-to-end with programmable Manufacturing-as-a-Service capabilities that can withstand disruptions. A Digital Twin will provide a reliable model to represent production and operational data of an SMN to unlock deeper IMC intelligence. Collected data will train machine learning models to predict potential disruptions, such as natural disasters or delayed shipments. AI algorithms will analyse the data and provide real-time reporting and visualization on a dashboard. The IMC and Digital Twin interaction will generate powerful insights and self-adapting abilities that support an SMN to evolve under human supervision by switching services between multiple external partners to respond to risks and disruptions and improve energy efficiency, product circularity and environmental sustainability across the entire production process. The effectiveness of NARRATE will be evaluated by testing the IMC in real production environments in quite diverse industry sectors.

Growing challenges are identified during the last years in both passenger and freight mobility, such as urbanization trends, the increasing complexity of stakeholder scene, e-commerce, rising fragmentation of freight transport. Despite the various technical challenges and shortcomings, current governance and regulatory systems have proven so far inadequate, dealing with the passengers and freight transport systems as independent -and thus disconnected- sectors while integration between passenger and freight transport has been a subject of debate in the transport community over the last years with a peak coming after the recent Covid19 crisis. DELPHI focuses on the strategic dimension of integrating passenger and freight transport in a single system aiming to deliver the enablers -both on technical and governance/regulatory level, towards a federated network of platforms for multimodal passenger and freight transport, capable of sharing in a seamless and secure manner, cross-sectoral, multi-modal passenger and freight transport data, as well as traffic management systems information. Moreover, DELPHI will utilise novel and ultra-efficient methodologies for traffic monitoring such as UAS-powered monitoring, multi-/inter-modal optimisation, AI/ML-powered algorithms and frameworks, and will exploit diverse modes for hybrid passenger and freight transport in different ecosystem types. To achieve its maximum potential, utmost interoperability and best optimisation results, DELPHI’s digital framework and transversal tools will be validated in the context of 4 pilots with complementary requirements and features.

The VITAL-5G proposal has the vision to advance the offered transport & logistics (T&L) services by engaging significant logistics stakeholders (Sea and River port authorities, road logistics operators, warehouse/hub logistic operators, etc.) as well as innovative SMEs and offering them an open and secure virtualized 5G environment to test, validate and verify their T&L related cutting-edge Network Applications (NetApps). The combination of advanced 5G testbeds (offered through participating MNOs / vendors) with vertical specialized facilities and infrastructure (offered by participating key logistics stakeholders) through an open service validation platform (repurposed and created by the project) will create a unique opportunity for third parties such as SMEs to validate their T&L related solutions and services utilizing real-life resources and facilities, otherwise unavailable to them. The platform will provide to 3rd party experimenters, the necessary testing and validation tools, offering them a trusted and secure service execution environment under realistic conditions that supports multi tenancy. Such an elaborate validation mechanism will allow for the further refinement and fine-tuning of the provided services fostering the creation of new services and the evolution of existing ones, while boosting the SME presence in the emerging 5G-driven logistics ecosystem. The VITAL-5G proposal plans to showcase the added-value of 5G connectivity for the European T&L sector by adopting a multi-modal approach containing major logistics hubs for freight and passengers (sea ports, river ports, warehouse / logistics hubs, highways, etc.) as well as the respective stakeholders (road operators, port authorities, 3rd party logistics (3PL) operators), thus creating an end-to-end chain of connected T&L services accommodating the entire continent.

The FOR-FREIGHT project aims to maximise the utilisation of multimodal freight transport capacity and reduce the average cost of freight transport through the development of novel solutions and their integration with legacy logistics systems. This will enable more effective and sustainable management of goods and freight flows in airports, ports, inland terminals and various logistics nodes, taking into account the requirements of all involved stakeholders, and accounting for economic, environmental and social aspects. Through the FOR-FREIGHT solutions the following functionalities will be delivered: i) real-time door-to-door tracking and status monitoring & control of cargo, ii) Decision Support Systems for the optimization of resource utilization based on Digital Twin concept, iii) Increased resilience against large scale disruptive events and increased security of information based on Blockchain technology, iv) Increased sustainability through the implementation of a carbon footprint assessment framework and use of alternative modes of transportation (subway). To achieve these ambitious goals, the FOR-FREIGHT project engages world-leading T&L stakeholders specializing in different modes of transportation, such as port and airport authorities, terminal operators, airfreights handlers, train operators and major transport/shipping operators and brings them together with leading SW and technology developers, research organizations and innovative SMEs. This collaboration will drive the deployment of three state-of-the-art multimodal trial facilities, to enable real life trials in operational environments covering heterogeneous multimodal scenarios, namely, seaport to logistics hub and last mile delivery, seaport to airport (airfreight) and river-port to rail cargo. A cloud-based experimentation platform will be offered by FOR-FREIGHT, integrating access to the three trial sites, and offering advanced monitoring and experimentation tools.