The Grid has the potential to make a significant advance beyond the Internet, by turning it from a passive information medium into an active tool for creating and exploring new knowledge. Nowadays, this potential is becoming a reality and is emerging to Next Generation Grids (NGG) thanks to the far more cost-effective and universally applicable technology. Taking into consideration that Grids started delivering benefits to their adopters, this book chapter focuses on providing a business–technical presentation of two potential NGG applications, from two competitive and highly dynamic markets, including complex collaborations, which have shown rapid growth over the past decades; the supply chain management and the Cargo Transportation Logistics. The authors present a set of NGG components, the adoption of which in the aforementioned application domains addresses efficiently a set of technical issues ranging from performance to dynamic negotiation, and tackle the main trends and challenges in the corresponding business sectors.

Crashworthy structural elements may be subjected to various types of loading, such as axial or lateral compression and bending; consequently, extensive theoretical and experimental research work has been performed exploring the collapse mechanisms occurred under such loading conditions. However, the designer needs theoretical tools ranging from simple analytical calculations to full finite element analysis using non-linear, large deformation codes. The main objective of this paper is to apply the explicit FE code LS-DYNA through a Grid computing platform in order to simulate the crash behaviour of thin-walled cylindrical steel tubes subjected to three-point bending test in various cases of the position and direction of the imposed load. The simulation has been carried out through the GRIA computing platform that advances the computational performance of the executed tests, and additionally enables the remote and collaborative conduction of the experiments. The results taken from the simulation allow in drawing useful concluding remarks pertaining to the design of the crushing process.

The Grid has the potential to make a significant advance beyond the Internet, by turning it from a passive information medium into an active tool for creating and exploring new knowledge. Nowadays, this potential is becoming a reality and is emerging to Next Generation Grids (NGG) thanks to the far more cost-effective and universally applicable technology. Taking into consideration that Grids started delivering benefits to their adopters, this book chapter focuses on providing a business–technical presentation of two potential NGG applications, from two competitive and highly dynamic markets, including complex collaborations, which have shown rapid growth over the past decades; the supply chain management and the Cargo Transportation Logistics. The authors present a set of NGG components, the adoption of which in the aforementioned application domains addresses efficiently a set of technical issues ranging from performance to dynamic negotiation, and tackle the main trends and challenges in the corresponding business sectors.