A Control Tower For The Early Identification Of Distress In Logistics Networks And Essential Supply Chains (ACTING NoW)

Logistics is an essential activity in general and even more so during the COVID-19 pandemic. Lockdowns and other restrictive measures (e.g. border controls) have severely slowed down the flow of goods and forced the European Commission to call on EU Member States to keep transport flows moving to deliver critical goods. The project will deploy a "national control tower" to assess and monitor the status of the logistics networks and essential supply chains, so to try and take corrective measures aimed at preventing collapses in essential services and other economic activities. Driven by LCL and LIST, Research Luxembourg reacted by providing in a matter of days a first weekly survey for transporters and logistics operators and is currently working on a second survey to collect data on the functioning of supply chains. The public agency INCERT hosts the surveys and provides basic visual analytics through a pre-existing dashboard that has been adapted to the need. To support decision-makers in selecting the right approach, LIST, LCL and INCERT will take advantage of the Digital Twin technology that Gartner ranks among the top 10 Strategic Technology Trends of the last three years. In the six months covered by this project they plan to adapt the two surveys following feedback from the user communities and the potential evolution of the crisis; improve the data analytics and visualisation tools as much as possible; start collecting requirements for a more sophisticated platform that should be able to automatically import data from external systems (e.g. ERPs), offer enhanced analytics and visualization functionalities as well as rapid alerts to its users via a dedicated mobile app. Finally, they will design, test and validate a prototype of the dashboard and the mobile app.