Our series of Marketplace Spotlight articles focus on the partners making the Yocova platform come alive and the digital aviation solutions they provide. Here we hear from Block Aero about their blockchain solutions, and how they are making a difference in aviation.
Part 1: Conceptual understanding of blockchain application
Aerospace companies are legally required to create, keep and make accessible formal records across a wide variety of operational functions – including production, maintenance, airworthiness, and safety – in order to adhere to a strict range of industry regulations, and ensure passengers can travel with absolute confidence.
Moreover without these accurately maintained records the commercial value of a company’s assets are seriously compromised.
As asset management across the aviation industry becomes ever more sophisticated with every technical evolution, yet there are still some serious loopholes and inefficiencies to be addressed.
It is not uncommon for different entities within a single business to maintain their records in different, often slightly idiosyncratic fashions – dependent on how they have been collected and stored in the past and the systems or procedures each area of the business is most comfortable with.
Consequently data is routinely stored and managed in a variety of ways within the same organisation. Therefore it can be extremely difficult to have a truly coherent view of all the asset data within a single department, business unit or organisation, let alone across all businesses in one industry sector.
In order to function efficiently at some stage all these datasets and records need to be processed and reconciled systematically. Where they are not disputes and production delays often occur, requiring complex, time-consuming and often expensive resolution processes.
Aerospace OEMs and consultancies estimate that across the global industry, this inability to easily access quality data has an astonishing knock-on cost – with between US$50B to $75B lost to data-related inefficiencies every year.
However, with recent advancements in blockchain technology, this situation could finally be about to change.
Given that it can deliver significant material benefits, the adoption of blockchain in aviation asset management seems inevitable – despite some of the complex hurdles that need to be addressed.
According to the IATA, blockchain has been identified as one of the technologies that may have a major impact on the future of aviation.
A report by Boston Consulting Group (BCG) suggests that blockchain will be able to resolve a range of internal operational issues, glitches and quirks that currently plague the complex ecosystems within the aviation sector.
Block Aero has spent five years building a total life-cycle aviation asset management platform-as-a-service (PaaS) solution – with a containerized implementation of Hyperledger Fabric infrastructure and a powerful web application.
The application makes it easy for airlines and aerospace companies to upload PDF, XLS, JSON, or XML files to organize data into blockchain-powered digital ‘passports’, supporting a fully digital and easy to navigate asset management system.
With digitized assets, Block Aero can facilitate the move away from inefficient old processes and protocols, to deliver a consistent and cryptographically secure, intra- (as well as inter-) organizational view of the workflow, documentation, and asset status.
This will dispense with the costly, repetitive, and potentially error-prone manual inputs – and lack of trust in previously associated with ‘disconnected’ systems.
With Block Aero’s blockchain each asset is given a globally unique identifier (i.e. BAA-123-4567890-aBcD-eFgH-101010), which serves as the decentralized reference for its digital passport.
Organizations can therefore create and append data blocks to assets, building up several chains of information that help people answer the important questions of ownership, operation, and the method of compliance for determining and ensuring both the initial and continued airworthiness of the asset has been maintained throughout its entire lifecycle. Each ‘back-to-birth’ event is like a stamp in a passport, effectively a ‘block’ on the asset chain.
Once a physical asset has been assigned a digital passport thereafter every document, record, transaction and/or any other event related to the physical asset is appended to its digital identity – giving an accurate, permanent, and holistic view of the asset across its lifecycle.
Data is reconfigured to comply with industry standards, such that it will be accepted by global regulators and users across aviation value chain – giving them a comprehensive, and up-to-date digital representation of their asset.
Thereafter this digital passport is continually updated by all relevant business partners, as various work-related functions are performed and new data is generated and assigned to the asset. This can then be used to instantly provide the counterparty of a transaction the complete lifecycle data for the asset when appropriate.
Network-linked participants can thereafter initiate peer-to-peer transactions to streamline business processes – thereby saving time, minimising costs, and provoking an authentic competitive advantage over those businesses that cling to the old, sometimes vague conventions around aviation asset management.
- Generate ‘digital twins’ in relation to physical assets
- Secure those twinned assets within the private blockchain network
- Bring decades of cumulative data and documentation onto the Block Aero system seamlessly
- Rebuild an asset’s ‘back-to-birth’ history – whilst ensuring its long-term legacy
- Strengthen data integrity, from compliance to on-going maintenance
- Easy access to all records
- Streamline multi-organisational workflows
- Automate compliance date management
- Bring offline procedures online
- Share only the data you choose to share
Part 2 of this article will delve deeper into technical aspect of blockchain implementation, to help you understand its relevance and game-changing potential across the aviation sector.
Find out more about Block Aero
Visit their Storefront on Yocova and request a free trial.
Author: Team Yocova
Published 17th May 2022
;
