Real-time control and supervision will play a crucial role in grid management and operation on all voltage levels. Moreover the need for visionary decentralized approaches and architectures is widely recognized in the European Union, due the rapid growth of distributed energy sources (DRES) across Europe. eDREAM aims towards this direction, and will contribute to the transfiguration of traditional market approaches and smart grid operations into novel decentralized and community-driven energy systems fully exploring local capacities, constraints and Virtual Power Plants optimization in terms of local and secure grid nodes stabilization. eDREAM will conduct pioneer research for the delivery of a closed-loop DR environment that will incorporate novel near real time demand response (NRT-DR) verification assessment mechanisms (addressing the share of the contractual services effectively delivered through DSOs). Key research challenges will be addressed by the consortium partners such as the adoption of a secure blockchain based NRT distributed ledger allowing DSOs to know promptly, in a secure non-modifiable way the effective amount of service delivered and accordingly to activate the appropriate financial settlement to the flexibility providers. Our vision is also to increase through novel and decentralized decision-making mechanisms the delivery of reliable, on-time and context-aware flexibility profiles collected intelligently from (community-based) Virtual Power Plants, targeting the local balancing of demand and supply through a series of optimized DR strategies. Targeting technologies that will mature in the next five to ten years, eDREAM will also survey new techniques for assessing DR capabilities of districts through multimodal fusion of information coming from drones, and will establish a roadmap and guidelines for potential use by flexibility providers and DSOs towards short and long-term plans. Finally, eDREAM will provide a multi-scale and interactive visualization platform based on graph analytics towards stakeholders to be able to optimize their services offered in the DR added-value chain, whilst introducing a novel big data streaming ecosystem to support robust portfolio segmentation and clustering services to end-users of eDREAM framework. The project will be tested in two different pilot sites: one in Italy and the other in England. Emotion will contribute to User requirements, use cases and system specification, modelling techniques for Energy Consumption Baseline Flexibility Estimation and Virtual Power Plants, blockchain driven self-enforcing smart contracts for DR energy transactions modelling, tracking and decentralized control and eDREAM validation and reliability analysis. Emotion will also be involved in exploitation of projects results.