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One of the most demanding and computationally intensive applications in the field of I&R Supply and Distribution Chain Management is "Retail Management" (RM). RM means a set of applications finalised to manage and optimise the sell-out of goods and products at the points of sale. This is implemented by "sales forecasting patterns and algorithms", "product assortment planning" and "goods replenishment optimisation". The mission of BE05 is to prove and demonstrate the technical feasibility and business convenience, for both solution providers (GRID users) and end customers (RM users), through an innovative Grid Application Development Environment.

Fact Sheet

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Some of the most diffuse and popular solutions in the Industry & Retail (I&R) sector suffer from heavy performance problems. This compels final industrial customers to buy/rent, or to reserve at service providers' server farms, very powerful and expensive hardware/software platforms. Furthermore, service providers' engineers have to design and implement customer specific architecture and infrastructure solutions, which are difficult to maintain, evolve and reuse.
This fact has a direct negative consequence on business. Hundreds if not thousands of enterprises (mainly SMEs) needing I&R services, have to overcome the entry-level barrier of huge investment costs required for buying or renting hw and sw - under current traditional architectures, an almost insuperable hurdle for most of them. At the same time, as each solution is specific and different from the others, service providers are unable to conduct a serious and well-founded hw/sw infrastructure development and maintenance policy, required for a “reference system solution”.
Hence, the business experiment background and motivation is that there is an extreme need for I&R services, but current architectures and platforms are too expensive for end-users and too difficult to maintain and manage for service providers. In addition to that, I&R solution developers (mid-users in the GRID value chain) find it extremely difficulti to keep up with the ever more demanding performance requirements when founding their solutions onto traditional centralised architectures.
GRID-based architectures could be the ideal solution to overcome such technical and business hurdles. End customers would be relieved from high infrastructure investments while preserving if not improving system performances. Solutions providers would be relieved from code optimisation details allowing them to concentrate on the value-added aspects of their applications and on the interoperability, maintainability and re-usability features of the code.
Grid middleware: Assist programming environment on top of Globus 4.0