The purpose of the conference held at Erasmus University, was to collaborate with industry and customs executives to ensure CORE remains relevant to those who will, one day, use and benefit from the solutions being developed.

CORE (Consistently Optimised Resilient Secure Global Supply-Chains), is a four-year R&D project, part funded by the EU. CORE is designed to enhance the protection and security of the global supply chain, while reducing its vulnerability to disruption.

After familiarising the attending stakeholders with the aims and objectives of the CORE programme, delegates were introduced to the IoL demonstrator, described as a network of physical devices such as vehicles, containers, pallets and vessels which are embedded with electronics, software, sensors, actuators, and network connectivity that enable these objects to collect and exchange data for logistics purposes.

The project team went on to describe the considerable steps that have been made towards making this a reality with the development of the Shipping Information Pipeline (SIP), a federated architecture creating the network connectivity for IoL, which is based on the Data Pipeline concept.

The team presented a customs dashboard for customs administrations, enabling them to connect to the SIP and collect more accurate data from the relevant supply chain partners about imported goods, which leads to effective de-risking of consignments in trusted trade lanes.

The next major events in relation to the SIP will be an early pilot involving a small number of containers trading between Mombasa and Rotterdam. This will be followed by a full pilot towards the end of 2016 involving various shippers that trade many containers between Savannah (US) and Rotterdam, culminating in a large scale pilot starting in November/December 2016 which will involve multiple shippers and ports, as well as a large number of containers.