by Rebecca Johnson | 4 July 2023 | Blockchain, Featured, Track and Trust
Datarella and its partners Weaver Labs and OroraTech are proud to announce: Track & Trust has successfully passed the Factory Acceptance Test of the European Space Agency (ESA)! The development of Track & Trust has been successfully completed, undergoing rigorous testing procedures. Now, it is time for Track & Trust to showcase its capabilities and create value in a real-world deployment.
*** Visit our new Track & Trust website for more information ***
Track & Trust combines modern Web3, communication, and satellite technologies, creating a robust supply chain solution that caters to the actual needs of users. By leveraging these cutting-edge advancements, Track & Trust allows logistics companies and humanitarian organizations to navigate complex scenarios, such as aid supply coordination in regions with compromised or non-existent communications infrastructure. Even in remote and disconnected areas, Track & Trust provides the transparency and authentic data required for efficient operations.
From the very beginning, efforts were made to understand the requirements in the field of logistics precisely. Real logistic processes were examined to identify their weaknesses. We have dedicated ourselves to developing a robust system that ultimately had to meet high stress criteria in the testing procedures required by the ESA, which funded the project with about EUR 1.5 million. We went through a complex development process where partners with three different technologies had to position their core competencies appropriately while integrating them seamlessly to become more than the sum of their parts.
The product – introducing Probabilistic Supply Chain Tracking
Unlike traditional supply chain solutions, Track & Trust offers a probabilistic approach to tracking goods. Any interaction with the shipment, including scanning a Track & Trust QR code, triggers a status update, providing as much information about the shipment as possible! It is ultimately up to the client which information to utilize. Track & Trust’s emphasis on data collection unlocks a world of possibilities for process innovation. By leveraging the data obtained from the operational area, logisticians can complement and expand their services in new and exciting ways. This data-driven approach opens doors to potential future extensions, such as training AI models to predict delivery shrinkage, stock levels, and route recommendations. By harnessing the power of data, Track & Trust generates added value for logistic companies’ customers, offering new competitive advantages in the industry
What lies ahead in the journey of Track & Trust?
We have successfully completed a significant milestone with the Factory Acceptance Test. Concrete processes with our partners are already being planned for the upcoming pilot phase. In the coming weeks, these plans will be further refined, and the delivery of Track & Trust system components will be carried out in the most suitable deployment area where it can achieve the greatest impact and benefit. We will announce the specific deployment scenario in our future blog posts. So, stay tuned!
Our next milestone is the Site Acceptance Test. Here we will conduct another series of tests under real conditions before the system is used for the first time by logisticians and partners.
We are excited to demonstrate the impact and benefits of Track & Trust very soon and to revolutionize the supply chain sector with its technological potential!
by Martin Schäffner | 18 October 2021 | Blockchain, Featured, Track and Trust
Datarella is proud to announce the signing of a two-year contract with the European Space Agency (ESA) to further work on the space-linked supply chain product Track & Trust (T&T). As the main contractor to ESA, Datarella is supported by Weaver Labs and OroraTech.
The consortium will jointly work on a Blockchain-based enterprise solution to tackle complex supply chain challenges that humanitarian agencies across the world face in order to track aid in locations that lack access to reliable communications infrastructure.
At the end of two years of development and commercial trials, Track & Trust aims to deliver a scalable cost-efficient communications platform & network combining satellite, IoT mesh and blockchain components serving mostly supply chain use cases. The end solution will be a modular product that will provide a plug and play communication network that allows for end-to-end tracking of the supply chain. This will start from the initial supply of humanitarian aid goods, and extend all the way to the last-mile shipments even when limited or no telecommunication infrastructure is available.
Track and Trust is a unique opportunity to combine Blockchain technology with SatCom and telecom technology to expand the range of offerings for a supply chain monitoring system. With Weaver Labs and OroraTech as our consortium partners and with the technical and financial support by ESA, we have a strong setup to make a success story out of Track and Trust.
Yukitaka Nezu, Co-Founder and CFO at Datarella.
We are thrilled to expand our work with the European Space Agency and play a vital role in the Track and Trust project with our product Cell-Stack. Our innovative telecoms solution will ensure connectivity across the supply chain, making it possible for goods to be tracked in a trusted way.
Maria Lema, Co-Founder at Weaver Labs
We are looking forward to bringing in our satellite technology expertise in Track and Trust. With our IoT communication modules we will connect the products developed by the consortium via satellite networks. This allows the global tracking of deliveries, even in very remote areas.
Rupert Amann, Co-Founder and Head of Satellite Development at OroraTech
We are very excited to be backed by the ESA Business Applications and Space Solutions Program and are very much looking forward to the successful integration of blockchain, space and network infrastructure technology into our product Track & Trust.
About Datarella’s Consortium Partners
About Weaver Labs
At Weaver Labs, we are creating an open and shared marketplace of connectivity assets, with an extensive focus on security, to accelerate innovation by enabling connectivity. Our innovative software layer called Cell-Stack aggregates and digitises all the necessary assets to build Networks and access connectivity on-demand.
Weaver Labs believes that an open marketplace of connectivity assets can truly democratise access to reliable networks and stimulate innovative applications, making networks accessible to new industries and citizens that require reliable connectivity. Through prioritising security in a diverse supply chain and building trust with an open infrastructure model, we believe that these are the fundamental foundations needed to foster innovation and thus, create a positive impact on society. More about Weaver Labs: https://weaverlabs.io/
About OroraTech
OroraTech is a NewSpace start-up headquartered in Munich, Germany, providing a global satellite-based wildfire detection and monitoring service by processing data from various available satellite sources. In parallel, the company is developing its own nanosatellite constellation specialized in wildfire detection, with the first satellite launching at the end of 2021. Founded in 2018 by Thomas Grübler, Björn Stoffers, Florian Mauracher, and Rupert Amann as a spin-off from the Technical University of Munich (TUM), the company has grown to an international team of 50 employees. OroraTech has been supported by research grants from the Bavarian and German government, the European Space Agency and the European Commission, and graduated accelerator programs at Google, Samsung, Plug&Play, ESA BIC, and the German Accelerator Silicon Valley. More about OroraTech: https://ororatech.com/
by Martin Schäffner | 10 October 2019 | Blockchain, Track and Trust
Whenever a crisis occurs, humanitarian organisations, their suppliers and logistics partners need to react as fast as possible to send urgently required goods to the people in need. During the previous months, we at Datarella have been working together with the UK Department for International Development’s innovation and future technology program, Frontier Technology Livestreaming, to enable transparency, collaboration and efficiency gains in humanitarian supply chains by implementing a blockchain-based tracking system. Now we are going to expand our ambitions by tackling the challenges of tracking the last-mile delivery, which is due to its demanding circumstances especially problematic. This is the second in a series of blog posts describing the work so far as well as what we’ve got planned. If you are not familiar with the Track & Trust story click here to learn about it.
Each humanitarian mission has its own specific challenges. Often, the conditions of roads are uncertain, and the telecommunication infrastructure is destroyed or unavailable. One of the biggest problems is keeping track of the chain of custody after the consignee receives goods from customs in-country.
Documentation about the current ownership and transactions of goods is mostly done manually, which makes it vulnerable to human error or fraud. As a consequence, high transaction and transportation costs occur since the implementing parties have a hard time finding out if the goods arrived properly at their destination.
To solve the problem of last-mile tracking within the humanitarian supply chain, we at Datarella applied for and received a kickstarter project grant from the European Space Agency. We are building out a series of prototypes to prove that our technical approach works while also engaging with our partners in humanitarian aid operations to test our assumptions.
As a solution, we propose our Track and Trust System combining bleeding edge blockchain and IoT technology to close the documentation gap in the last mile.
Hereby, we need to tackle two main challenges:
- The solution needs to document transactions of goods and their location in the blockchain without being directly connected to the internet.
- No expensive, eye-catching or complicated hardware can be installed in the trucks, which are delivering the goods since it might be stolen, endanger the driver or might be too complex used easily by drivers.
To solve the problem of offline data transmission, Datarella is working together with Orora Technologies to test the usability of a LoRa-Based Mesh Network. With the help of this low-cost, self-healing network data will be transmitted to the satellite base station. From there it will be uploaded using efficient Short Burst Data transmissions to the Globalstar satellite constellation.
Finally, all transactions will be saved into a private permissioned Ethereum blockchain to create a transparent and tamper-resistant register of transactions, which will serve the stakeholders as a single source of truth.
Over the next few weeks we’ll be describing our work to solve last mile delivery issues by augmenting the existing Track & Trust system with various offline capabilities.
We’ll be writing a series of blog posts outlining the work so far and what’s coming up soon. Stay tuned!
