Title
Swiss-French consortium looking for an industrial partner to contribute to the project “Nation Prod-View” in the framework of EIC Open pathfinder - Horizon Europe : a blockchain-based platform for an optimized access to industrial production capacity.
AbstractConsortium members: - Swiss startup within international company offering hightech comprehensive solutions in harsh and critical environments - French startup specialized in data cryptography - French joint venture launched by 4 major aeronautics and defence companies The consortium is looking for a partner to participate to the conception of a platform called Nation ProdView, aiming at facilitating access to industrial production capacity while allowing suppliers to optimize the use of their machine
DescriptionOver the past five years, global supply chains have faced significant disruptions due to events like the pandemic, major geopolitical changes, and interstate conflicts. These challenges have highlighted the importance of strengthening risk management strategies and ensuring business continuity.
In response, countries have bolstered their regulatory frameworks to mitigate these risks. For example, the US has introduced specific provisions in the Defense Federal Acquisition Regulation Supplement (DFARS), while the UK s Ministry of Defence launched a supply chain resilience initiative, DEF CON 565, in July 2023.
The aeronautics industry is also experiencing supply chain issues, with companies like Airbus and ATR facing challenges. For instance, Airbus is struggling to ramp up production of its A350 aircraft, and ATR s development efforts are being hindered by supply chain tensions. Nation Prod-View consists of a marketplace that enables optimized access to industrial production capacity. The solution is based on three pillars:
• Production Capacity Analysis : Production data from suppliers ERPs (Enterprise Resource Planning systems) are analyzed in real-time to estimate their production capacities.
• Matching buyers with suppliers: At any time, thanks to an integrated matching engine, buyers can identify suppliers capable of producing specific components.
• Data protection: All data is secured by a public blockchain and can be analyzed while remaining confidential, thanks to the use of a cutting-edge cryptographic method called "homomorphic encryption".
The platform has been specifically conceived to match the needs of manufacturing industry groups and constructors in the aerospace and defense sectors, but can be leveraged by any type of enterprise user, from the medical to the automotive sectors and beyond, looking to :
- Ease access to industrial production capacity, considering the unpredictability of the current market, with increasing geopolitical tensions, demand shocks, supply chain disruptions, etc.
- For suppliers (companies), optimize resource utilization and smooth out their workload to cope with both rapid increases and sudden drops in customer demand.
Platforms operating mode:
1. Supplier registration : Each supplier lists its machine catalog, specifying production capacities in terms of producible parts.
2. Buyer request : The buyer requests that quantity X of part Y be produced within deadline Z.
3. Supplier matching : Based on data provided by each supplier and real-time connections with their ERPs, the software proposes a list of suppliers capable of meeting the buyer s needs.
4. Supplier selection and purchase order : The buyer selects a supplier and issues a purchase order. Legal and regulatory analyses will determine whether this function is operated by Nation Prod-View or outside the platform to ensure the security of this information.
5. Penalty system : A penalty system is in place to exclude suppliers that have provided inaccurate capacity data.
The consortium is looking for an mid-to-large size industry group from all eligible countries except for France and Switzerland to join the consortium in order to :
- Participate to the conception of the product
- Experiment its use at internal corporate level
The development of the MVP is anticipated to span across one year. Deadline for application submission for the HORIZON-EIC-2025-PATHFINDEROPEN is 21 May 2025. Deadline for EOIs is 1 May 2025.
Advantages and innovation
The platform would be based on 3 technical pillars:
1. For connection to ERPs and retrieval of industrial data to be aggregated into a single database: a classic Application Programming Interface (API) system. At the moment of connecting an enterprise to the platform, a data model must be applied so that production data are incorporated within Nation-Prod View according to a shared standard. This does not impact in any way the internal data model used within the industry group that uses the platform.
2. For data aggregation from different companies: decentralized infrastructure of the blockchain type using the Ethereum virtual machine standard.
3. For confidential data analysis: homomorphic encryption cryptographic method (FHE, "fully homomorphic encryption"). This is a technology that allows analyzing encrypted data without prior decryption. In particular, Nation Prod-View would use the FHE stack provided by the French start-up. This would ensure end-to-end protection of company data, which would never be displayed or processed in plain text during the various analysis steps. The FHE solution from the start-up indeed allows working on confidential data and extracting analyses without revealing sensitive information.
This technical approach has never been tested for industrial applications. Blockchain-based solutions in the field have always leveraged rather private infrastructures, which solves the data protection issue but introduces problematic trust assumptions. The consortium proposes a different methodology based on public, agnostic decentralized infrastructures, while leveraging FHE for data protection.
Technical Specification or Expertise Sought
Industry group (manufacturing type), size from 500 employees (roughly) onwards
Sectors : not crucial, but ideally : Defense, Aeronautics, Space, Automotive, Heavy Industry. Open also for other sectors (ex. medical equipment) that experience the pain point the company is addressing with its solution.
The tasks to be performed by the partner sought*:
- Contribution to the conception of the platform
- Testing of the solution at internal level
Framework program
Horizon Europe
Call title and identifier
HORIZON-EIC-2025-PATHFINDEROPEN
Submission and evaluation scheme
Anticipated project budget
Coordinator required
Yes
Deadline for EoI 1 May 2025
Deadline of the call 21 May 2025
Project duration in weeks
Web link to the call
https://ec.europa.eu/info/funding-tenders/opportunities/portal/screen/opportunities/topic-details/HORIZON-EIC-2025-PATHFINDEROPEN
Project title and acronym
Nation Prod View