IOTA’s future in the supply chain and the activities of the Industrial IOTA Lab Aachen (IILA)

After publishing a first article about the activities of the WZL in Aachen and the cooperation with Grandcentrix in April this year, we would now like to provide a small update. In addition, we would like to explain the possibilities when using IOTA in the supply chain. First of all many thanks to Daniel Trauth, from whose great article we were allowed to use parts for our update: https://medium.com/industrial-iota-lab-aachen-wzl-of-rwth-aachen/manufacturing-economy-e541066889ee

A lot has happened since our last article. The Industrial IOTA Lab Aachen (IILA) was established in April 2018 as a joint project of the Laboratory for Machine Tools and Production Engineering WZL of RWTH Aachen University and Senseering GmbH, a university spin-off. IILA is a community driven laboratory which offers students, lecturers, industry representatives and enthusiasts for research in artificial intelligence, machine economy, machine-to-machine communication, distributed ledger technologies (mainly IOTA), and the Industrial Internet of Things.

The IOTA Industrial Lab Aachen received $ 50,000 in funding from the IOTA ecosystem fund. It offers lecturers and students a chance to connect with industry representatives on artificial intelligence, machine-to-machine communication, machine economy, and distributed-ledger-based technologies. The laboratory is currently funded by RWTH Aachen University in Germany.

Current status of the WZL x GCX x IOTA Web-Front-end

Let us first see what developments there are in the WZL in Aachen in collaboration with grandcentrix GmbH (GCX). It was recently the complete payment process in a proof of concept (PoC) tested and we may show a video of it. The subject of this Proof of Concept is an industrial fineblanking machine type XFT 2500 speed from Feintool AG. The goal of this PoC is to extract production data of fineblanked components from the machine control in real time, secure data persistance through the tangle and retrieve proof of integrity via a web-based frontend. The frontend access gives full availability to the tangle network making it possible to check data integrity for each workpiece dataset. Micro-payments with IOTA are now accepted for each part produced following a pay-per-use model, transforming the front-end into a conceptual Data Marketplace.