Viva Technology 2023

DataPorts

ITI | Traxens | PRODEVELOP | IBM Israel | OTE | Everis | UPV | ICCS | UDE | CERTH | Fraunhofer ISST | THPPA | Valenciaport Foundation

CHALLENGE:

Although many projects/initiatives have dealt and/or are dealing with developing data platforms architectures in diversified application domains, not many projects have addressed integration in port environments with the possibility of including cognitive services/applications and extending/federating the platform to whole transportation routes covering whole Europe. Lack of interoperable, scalable, reliable data platforms causes major technological and business issues such as the impossibility to plug non-interoperable data sources into heterogeneous data platforms, the impossibility to develop applications to exploit heterogeneous data in homogeneous and/or cross domains, slowness of data technology introduction at a large-scale, discouragement in adopting data sharing technology, increase of costs, scarce reusability of data, user dissatisfaction, and lack of unified data governance mechanisms.

SUCCESS:

DataPorts aims to design, develop, set-up and operate a data platform for the trusted, secure and reliable data sharing with IDS connectors and trading among the actors operating in the diverse supply chains involved in the seaports, also enabling the connection with other stakeholders in the logistics supply chain.

BENEFITS

The adoption and use of this Data Platform by existing connected / digital ports will imply their transition to actual cognitive ports, taking real advantage of the huge amount of data produced by the stakeholders and opening the way to new capabilities: Real-time control of operations; Streamlined decision making; Accurate prediction of future events and situations; Prescriptive analytics.

COMPONENTS

In the context of the DataPorts project, an industrial data platform (cognitive ports data platform) has been designed and implemented that: 1. Connects to different digital infrastructures currently existing in digital seaports, enabling the interconnection of a wide variety of systems into a tightly integrated ecosystem, 2. Sets the policies for a trusted and reliable data sharing and trading based on data owners’ rules and offering a clear value proposition, and 3. Leverages on the data collected to provide advanced data analytics services based on which the different actors in the port value chain cloud develop novel AI and cognitive applications. In the context of the DataPorts platform, to realize data sharing and data exchange, two main approaches are considered: • Data is stored off-chain: Generally, in this approach, we follow the concept of the International Data Spaces Association (IDSA) reference architecture model. In a nutshell, we consider the P2P data exchange between the data owners and data consumers through the IDSA connectors. To ensure the security and privacy aspects, blockchain manages consent of access to data. Smart contracts decide if a particular access to data is allowed concerning the invoker’s credentials and the specification of access rules for the data. • Data is stored on-chain (blockchain for shared data): Blockchain platform records transactions related to shared data and processes of all participants in a business network. For instance, cold chains alarms of a container for verification of its state such as if conditions have been compromised, allows everybody in the network to be aware of the event and act upon it. This approach in fact ensures verifiable and immutable information on shared data through the entire chain to all business network participants, serving as a single source of truth and providing transparency and a not-repudiation process. In the first approach, the data (sovereign data) is kept on the owner’s premises. The metadata for sovereign data is published to the broker (IDSA broker). A data consumer needs to understand whether the data he seeks is a shared data stored in Blockchain or is stored by a data owner. To clarify this, the data consumer must access the IDSA broker, and in case the data is sovereign data, data sharing rules are used to determine if a data access is allowed. Eventually, in case of a legitimate data access, a peer-to-peer secure communication with data owner to obtain data is initialized through IDSA connectors.