EDITOR’S COMMENT
Blockchain can improve
safety in aviation
Leveraging the open ledger of Blockchain allows the life
cycle of every part of an aircraft to be recorded, explains
Bas de Vos at IFS.
B
lockchain is one of the most
discussed and intriguing
technologies out there today. I will
not go deeply into the specifics of how
it works since that has been covered by
many other sources. Suffice it to say that
it is a huge, global distributed ledger or
database running on many devices and
open to anyone within the Blockchain. In
the Blockchain, information, or anything
of value can be stored. The purpose is
to ensure a 100% secure, verifiable and
traceable database protocol.
So far, most use cases have been
focused on the financial sector, including
transaction management whereby costs are
reduced by keeping property ownership
and records or using it to track high-value
goods such as diamonds. All these cases
are about creating secure, verifiable and
traceable storage of information. There is,
however, a huge, untapped market in the
area of asset management. Let me highlight
this by describing an example from the
aviation industry.
Let us have a look at the highly
regulated aviation industry. A modern
aircraft consists of roughly two to three
million parts. It is crucial to know the
provenance of these parts, that is original
manufacturer and exact product model
and version, in order to ensure they
have the right specification and are not
counterfeit. In addition, many of these
parts are so-called tracked items. Not
only their provenance, but the entire
maintenance history of these parts needs
to be transparent.
Today, the many participants in an
asset’s lifecycle – from manufacturer to
transporters, maintainers and operators
Bas de Vos is Director of IFS Labs at IFS.
– each have their own disparate systems
for managing assets. Consequently, it is
quite difficult to establish and maintain a
single version of the truth when looking
at that asset’s entire life cycle. Often,
these records can be incomplete or
still non-digitised, and communication
between the different participants is often
conducted on paper or even verbally.
Lack of standardisation leads to limited
traceability and the cost for compliance, if
even possible, can be very high.
What if all of these participants
submitted a transcript of the transactions
into a purpose-specific, distributed ledger,
like Blockchain, to which only authorised
participants would have access?
The manufacturer would initially start
the Blockchain for the asset and each
participant would add the relevant blocks
to it. The distributor would let the chain’s
participants know that the asset was
transported from point A to point B, while
the operator would register the number of
flight hours that the asset has undergone.
Using Blockchain for this asset
management scenario would give you a
100% verifiable, 100% traceable and 100%
trustworthy history of the asset’s life cycle
in real time. Each individual participant in
the chain still has the features and benefits
of their own business applications to run
their business. Potential benefits for the
Blockchain participants:
Improved data quality through
minimised need for manual data entry
Single, traceable record of
serial numbers
Complete and accurate
maintenance history
Trust between service providers,
suppliers and operators
Reduced cost for compliance
More flight hours for the aircrafts with
improved reliability of parts
So how can we achieve these benefits in
reality? There are several players that need
to work together to make this happen: the
technology providers like Microsoft with
Azure Blockchain as a Service must work
together with the regulating authorities,
such as the FAA, and the airlines and
their partners, as well as with software
vendors. We all need to work together and
be willing to share information to integrate
with the Blockchain.
We are not there yet, as there are still
several challenges to overcome. Things like
technical performance need to be thought
about as latency of transactions and
computing power could stand in the way
for achieving consensus within a chain.
Data ownership, privacy and security must
also be addressed.
There are certainly a few things
to consider in order to succeed with
Blockchain for asset management, but
there is a huge potential and possible
competitive edge for those who are willing
to get in on the ground floor.
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