The Industrial Digitisation Department at AERTEC, an international company specialising in aerospace technology, the University of Málaga (UMA) and Telefónica Tech have jointly developed a software project for the aeronautical industry that relies on blockchain technology.
Blockchain is a disruptive technology that adds trust to any business solution or process. Many sectors are already leveraging its advantages, and the aeronautical industry is implementing more and more use cases, such as the traceability of manufacturing processes.
This technological collaboration is the result of a project developed through the University Extension Course in Blockchain Technologies, directed by the NICS Lab Research Group at the University of Malaga. The course is co-led by UMA professor and researcher Isaac Agudo, who has commented that “the focus of the course is eminently practical. It uses a synchronous online class methodology in which, of course, the whole blockchain ecosystem is explained in detail, but focused, through an intense dialogue with companies, on real application cases that are of interest to our students and collaborators“.
AERTEC is one of the companies that has collaborated in this course, which reviews the various blockchain technologies in both public and private settings and their different applications in the business world, and has proposed a technological challenge by applying the knowledge developed in this training activity. Specifically, a development was undertaken that involved recording the information generated by IoT sensors distributed throughout an aviation manufacturing plant, and registering different physical parameters in blockchain through TrustOS with the aim of certifying the integrity of the functional test results. As Jerónimo Vázquez, head of the Software Solutions Department at AERTEC, points out, “we are convinced that this technology has a great deal of potential in our industrial field, where it is so crucial to ensure traceability through solid evidence from the manufacturing processes and tests of the different aircraft systems, in a complex environment of interaction between the final integrator and its entire supply network.”
The project makes use of the traceability and certification capabilities of TrustOS, the Blockchain service managed by Telefónica Tech. By using this service, the project team has been able to focus on the specific problem related to functional tests while incorporating all the immutability and transparency benefits inherent to Blockchain technology and detaching itself from the complexity of developing the components needed to record the information collected by the sensors, such as the appropriate connectors with the network, the Smart Contracts that record the information.
