Increasing Resilience of Smallholders with Multi-Platforms Linking Localized Resource Sharing – RESILINK

RESILINK builds resilience through real-time information exchange and generalized & localized resources sharing. It will leverage advanced digital technologies to propose sophisticated but easy to use/affordable solutions adapted to the smallholder communities. In RESILINK, simple, intuitive and multi-interface mobile applications interacting with digital platforms will be central to provide smallholders with the possibility of linking and sharing information in a real-time manner. Disruptive technologies such as Internet-of-Thing (IoT), Edge Computing, Linked-Data and AI-based Decision Support System (DSS) will be incrementally integrated to provide an increased level of automation for a number of agriculture/farming processes. While the ideas of connecting smallholders to market and sharing resources are not new, the approach taken by RESILINK is to provide a unique platform-of-platforms capable of integrating existing or future platforms into comprehensive dashboards/portfolios. To achieve its objectives, RESILINK will:

- seamlessly integrate IoT technologies to automatize a number of information exchanges related to resource sharing. RESILINK will further develop Edge-IoT components and demonstrate IoT integration benefits for resource sharing by deploying in the piloting program simple IoT devices along with low-cost and compact Edge-IoT gateways;

- develop decision-making with Artificial Intelligence to process multiple knowledge streams. The core functionality of the digital platform resides in the intelligent management of resources. Using cutting-edge modern Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning (ML) advanced analytics capabilities, RESILINK’s digital platform will leverage contextual intelligence to efficiently discover resources, identify trends, forecast and propose pertinent correlated resources to ultimately map & bind resources to requests in order to improve the smallholders’ agri-food supply & logistic chain. In addition, handling crisis situations requires the integration of multiple knowledge streams to reduce uncertainties and to efficiently adapt the response to the fast evolving conditions. RESILINK’s digital platform will develop an efficient and smart decision-making system capable of evaluating multiple knowledge streams to propose accurate and adapted recommendations;

- develop a resilient network ensuring high availability of services. As part of the Edge-IoT component, RESILINK will also provide resilience capabilities to the digital platform which can be split in a number of distributed, lower complexity and collaborating platforms that will be run on the network of Edge-IoT gateways. In this configuration, RESILINK will develop efficient Edge-ML approach into Edge-IoT gateways to also push intelligence and decision-making processes at the Edge.

- implement the platform-of-platforms approach for large-scale adoption and sustainability. RESILINK will adopt a platform-of-platforms design approach promoting a much wider and appealing ecosystem: (a) RESILINK wrapper components will enable resources from existing digital platforms to be discovered & integrated and, (b) RESILINK open API will allow development of new digital sharing platforms that can fully inter-operate with the RESILINK digital resource management platform to benefit from the RESILINK community.

- run an extensive piloting & evaluation program with smallholders for large-scale testing. While advanced technologies have the potential to provide efficient solutions, it is crucial to ensure RESILINK’s concepts acceptance and validate RESILINK components in a step-by-step and incremental manner. The piloting & evaluation program will extensively address RESILINK’s key issues: generalized sharing concept, needed sharing functionalities, payment systems, interaction models, level of privacy & security, adequation of user interface, automation level, simplicity of digital platform deployment, resource notification system, …