E-Grid

European Grid - A cooperative marketplace

What Inspired Us?

The Coronavirus emergency has caught some public administrations (PA) underprepared requiring everyone's help to reduce the risks and damage to the population. We have seen communities organizing and collectively finding new ways to support each other, their local hospitals, and the healthcare system. This help was also provided by industries that have changed their production chains to produce the goods needed to fight coronavirus.
However, this effort can't easily scale to regional, national, and European level without any support and organization.

This situation has inspired us to propose E-Grid, a collaborative marketplace. Our solution is to provide the possibility to improve and make organized requests, delivery, and management of critical and necessary assets to cope with the emergency period. Furthermore, after the crisis, it will be a platform for businesses to find new suppliers to maintain their production, and new clients (businesses and PA), to maintain or increase their income.

What E-Grid brings to the table?

E-Grid is a solution that will allow a quick and coordinated action between industries, small businesses, and the Public Administration.

This solution will help: Public Administration, by giving faster access to suppliers to produce goods to fight the emergency (medical, logistics, and so on). Moreover, it will allow different levels of PA to organize and resolve conflicts on goods that are competed; Industries, by having the possibility to produce the necessary assets required by the emergency will have an alternative way to maintain their income in case of a shortage of the demand for their main product. Communities, which will have the necessary needs available in a shorter time; Local businesses, which can become suppliers for other players in the market.

The system will allow companies to maintain and improve their supply-chain by finding new suppliers during and after the emergency. The system is built taking into account the hierarchical state of various institutions during emergencies. That is why we placed the public administration in a higher priority in the course of an emergency. The system will connect different levels of authorities, from local to national and European. This hierarchy will help to reduce the competition for the same good from different authorities.

E-Grid’s impact on the crisis?

We learned that during a COVID-19 like a crisis, certain primary goods are not always available, leading to the worsening of the crisis itself. The scarcity of these goods allows for increases in price making PA less able to buy supplies and make them available to the medical staff and the general public. Instead of competing for the necessary supplies, PAs should cooperate with each other, businesses, and the communities to end the emergency faster.

This is done efficiently by giving high priority to PA’s requests and lower to the ones from enterprises. To handle competition from various PAs, the system allows a discussion board where they can find an agreement. Ideally, this agreement should take account of the areas where the crisis is happening and its severity. In the future, we will like to automate the distribution of goods by adding live information about the emergency from each area.

The value of E-Grid after the crisis?

After the emergencies, the system will still be able to collect various requests of goods and products lacking in certain areas, and this will allow new enterprises to emerge or even change their current production line in order to meet the requests.

After the crisis, E-Grid will allow industries and companies to find new suppliers and come back to full production levels in a shorter period.

The necessities in order to continue the project?

To realize our project, we necessitate the collaboration of the EU, and national and local administrations as this project rely on their presence on the platform to have the maximum benefit for all the communities in case of emergencies.

Additionally, our team needs human resources with a business background. On the technological implementation, however, our team, whose components have remarkable technical expertise, can manage the workload in an optimal way, increasing functionality and correcting any problems quickly.

What you have done during the weekend?

Our weekend can be summarized into:

Develop the idea
Create a demo web application that contains:
1. A database
2. Pages with the required products
3. List of orders for a company
4. Map of the companies/orders
Write the project description
Create the video for the pitch
Deploy the web app

We are very proud to be part of the #EUvsVirus challenge and to present our solution. We pushed ourselves to tackle a problem in a domain that we are not familiar with, as we all are computer scientists. We also used new technologies and learned many new things as we tried to get the most out of this experience. This challenge made us feel closer even if we are living in different countries, as we spent more time together (online). We would like to thank the EU and the partners for this opportunity.