SELIS, the Shared European Logistics Intelligent Information Space, is a €17 million flagship European Commission-funded research project and part of the EC’s €77 billion Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme. The SELIS project will be brought to a successful close after three years of research and development. The outcome is a collaborative, open and cloud-based intelligence platform that encapsulates built-in industry knowledge while providing a trusted data sharing environment for all logistics stakeholders. It is enhanced by innovative Big Data analytics that support pattern recognition and predictive algorithms over massive supply chain data.

The SELIS project involves 37 partners across Europe, including research organisations, SMEs and large industry players, with Inlecom acting as Project Management and Coordinating partner. Prominent industry actors in the project include DHL, Sonae, Port of Rotterdam, Erasmus University Rotterdam, A.P. Moller – Maersk A/S, MGI International and IBM.  

Makis Kouloumbis, SELIS Project Manager and Program Delivery Director at Inlecom Systems, commented: “EU transport and logistics represents approximately 15% of global annual GDP. The sector has substantial potential for innovation-led initiatives that can drive new value. However, for many years, innovation in transport and logistics’ IT systems has been impeded by the need to integrate multiple legacy systems and solutions which have not been designed in the context of anticipating or supporting collaborative logistics models. 

The global supply chain recognises that reducing costs, improving operational efficiencies and meeting the European Commission’s CO2 targets represent some of the important KPIs that can be addressed through enhanced supply chain collaboration. Owed to this, the sector needs a secure and trusted vehicle which allows it to extract value from shared industry data – but in ways that enable full control over proprietary and commercially sensitive data.”

The SELIS project’s approach and contribution towards a ‘pan-European logistics intelligence-sharing platform’ has been through the federation of what SELIS has termed ‘Supply Chain Community Nodes’. These nodes incentivise and enable a complete transformation of how physical objects are packaged, transported, distributed and delivered in complex supply chains. The project hopes to motivate a faster, more efficient, flexible and sustainable supply chain ecosystems for Europe.

Kouloumbis commented: “SELIS’s Supply Chain Community Nodes offer a secure, user-friendly plug-and-play approach to sharing and analysing supply chain data, in turn enabling real-time collaboration across communities within the broader transport and logistics sector.”