Thales Nederland and KLM/AirFrance participate together in ICT-with-industry workshop

Thales Nederland and KLM/AirFrance were invited to submit a use case about the secure sharing and using of digital information for the 2016 edition of NWO’s ICT-with-Industry workshop. Prof. dr. Robert Meijer and prof. dr. Tom van Engers - from the Information Sciences faculty and the Law faculty – invited Leon Gommans, Science Officer at KLMs Technology Office, and dr. Kees Nieuwenhuis, Technology manager at the CTO-Office of Thales Nederland.

Workshop program

The ICT-with-Industry workshop 2016 program contained 4 different use cases: Digital Market Places (Thales Nederland/KLM-AirFrance), Sustainable Agility by Managing IT System Entropy (ING), Using Big Data in Plant Breeding (VLPB) and Code Coverage Improvements (SNS Bank). In total 12 people from industry and 36 university researchers and PhD students from 11 universities and research institutes participated in those 4 use case studies. The workshop demanded a significant investment in time and effort, from all participants and the organisers, because it runs over five full days and three (social) evening events. Hence, a lot of ground can be covered and the intended goal therefore is to demonstrate an (ICT) solution that addresses the use case problem statement.

Digital market places

The Thales Nederland/KLM-AirFrance use case was called Digital Market Places (and subtitled: Secure, Ad-hoc, Cloud-based market places supporting cross-organisation production processes).The problem statement was simple: current DMP services provided by service providers such as Amazon or eBay are catering for human-to-human interaction and only supply financial transaction support. However, what industry needs are services that enable company-to-company collaboration and support for setting up trust-relationships and maintain auditable transaction record. In addition, these collaboration environments have to be compliant with specifically designed and  agreed upon and fully transparent market rules and regulations and (expected) behavior. These ‘laws’ of the market place of course also need to be monitored and even enforceable in that same digital (and today we still say virtual) environment. What and where are the technology components then to build that type of ‘secure digital market places’ and how do we construct and operate them?

Share and process digital data

The details of the use case that Thales Nederland and KLM-AirFrance presented had a HUMS (Health and Usability Monitoring) context and were derived from KLMs MRO (Maintenance, Repair and Overhaul) new business needs. The coupling with the Thales interests is of course simple in that same HUMS context: we also want a place, acceptable for us and our customers, where we can share and process digital data for the benefit of both. But our Thales needs can go a lot further: think about our E-PLM related requirements, where we want to share and process digital information with the partners in our supply networks. Or, even closer to the ‘market’ metaphore that is included in the concept of a DMP, what if we extrapolate our Smart Industry vision all the way towards and automated bidding and manufacturing process of an instance of one of our complex products (say an I-Mast for customer XYZ). The latter suggestion may be thought provoking, but not technically feasible with today’s technology. But not impossible! And an excellent example of what the impact of the Digital Transformation can bring.

More information?

If you want to know more about the Thales 2016 use case and the scientific and technology results that came out of the workshop, please contact: Kees Nieuwenhuis, TNL CTO-Office, Technology manager.