Pioneering Web 3.0 crypto and mobile computing technologies address growing issues of product safety, traceability and counterfeiting and business need for high quality, trusted data for AI systems, Stephan Pottel, Manufacturing Strategy Director, EMEA, Zebra Technologies explains.
The AI Summit in Paris swiftly and powerfully shifted the tone around AI and has catalysed manufacturing leaders to think more about their own AI strategy. However, if we are talking about AI, then we have to talk about data.
“European AI focuses on AI adoption in complex applications, using our unique industrial and manufacturing data and know-how,” said EU President, Ursula von der Leyen. The use cases and compliance requirements for the pharmaceutical, life sciences, and manufacturing industries are high and require advanced solutions. These AI ambitions are naturally tied to the need for data – lots of high value, good quality data, which is available across many processes.
“Industries will be able to collaborate and federate their data. We are creating the safe space for them…because AI needs competition but also collaboration,” said President von der Leyen. This reminds us of the challenge manufacturers face within their own companies. If we want to harness the capabilities of AI, we have to ensure we are capturing, storing, managing and sharing large volumes of accurate data to train and test AI models.
The volume of data being created across supply chains and manufacturing sites grows exponentially and can be used to support intelligently automated operations. Yet only 15% of manufacturing leaders in Europe say they have real-time, work-in-progress (WIP) monitoring across the entire manufacturing process, according to the Zebra Manufacturing Vision Study.
Leaders say today’s most significant quality management issues are real-time visibility (28%), keeping up with new standards and regulations (28%), integrating data (26%), and maintaining traceability (23%). We know that data accuracy is essential for businesses, supply chains, and consumers. Each needs to be able to trust that they have accurate, complete, secure information about processes and products.
A lack of visibility and precarious data quality can give rise to safety, compliance, quality, and counterfeit risks, which undermine customer trust, harm reputation and create undesirable costs and potential fines.
New collaboration for highly accurate, secure, AI-ready data
Zebra Technologies and Merck have entered into a new collaboration aimed at co-creating solutions to address the challenges around product verification, authenticity, and trust. Through this collaboration, Merck’s M-Trust will be the first cyber-physical trust platform with a mobile computer scanning solution for addressing the growing issues of product safety, traceability and counterfeiting.
With Zebra’s portfolio and experience in mobile computing, asset visibility, and identity capture solutions and Merck’s patented authentication technologies, the collaboration is designed to create unprecedented levels of security, accuracy and trust in manufacturing value chains. This collaboration will also offer organisations high quality data for training and testing AI models, enhancing analytics capabilities as AI solutions are operationalised.
Thomas Endress, Head of M-Trust at Merck explained that by combining our expertise in identification and authentication, both companies will deliver essential solutions for reliable data access across value chains. This integration builds trust in AI systems regarding data authenticity and origin. Our collaboration presents great potential for customers to enhance their operations for more accurate and compliant processes that businesses and consumers can trust.
The first outcome of the collaboration will be a new handheld reader that works with the M-Trust platform which enables organisations to ensure product quality and authenticity across their value chains by immutably linking the physical and digital worlds, creating secure digital twins.
Powered by Web 3.0 technology, the M-Trust platform is designed to adapt to evolving technologies and regulatory requirements, such as the EU Digital Product Passport, empowering businesses to thrive in a rapidly changing landscape and remain competitive and trustworthy to consumers and regulators.
Multi-functional handheld scanner
The handheld reader device consists of a mobile scanner built on Zebra’s TC58 mobile computer and Merck’s security-pigment detector, the SEC-Reader to scan products and share data with the M-Trust platform via Wi-Fi 6E or 5G for verification. This all-in-one solution allows customers to verify products without switching devices and includes features for frontline communication, such as a two-way radio, a 16 MP camera, and a 1D/2D barcode scanner.
The TC58 is equipped with the next-generation Qualcomm™ 6490 octa-core processor, with up to 8GB of RAM and 128GB of Flash, plus a 2TB MicroSD card slot, giving users virtually instant response times in the most demanding applications with outstanding processing power, memory and storage.
Organisations can choose a 1D/2D scan engine for standard scanning ranges or a 1D/2D advanced range scan engine with Intellifocus technology to scan items in hand or over 40 ft./12 meters away (distance dependent on symbology type and size). Both options deliver split-second first time capture of virtually every barcode, regardless of condition.
The device’s scan and data capture abilities can be augmented for future and alternative use cases, with a standard and extended range ultra-rugged and high frequency radio frequency identification (RFID) sleds. These sleds read up to 1,300 RFID tags per second.
Developers can create applications that take full advantage of the device’s capabilities with Zebra Cloud DNA software suite, with management tool kits, browser tools for web applications, and data application programming interfaces (APIs) to integrate barcode data into applications without writing any code. Merck’s M-Trust portfolio also includes a developer kit featuring software developer kits (SDKs) and APIs for easy integration into existing workflows.
Patents for security
Merck has developed a number of patents that support this new solution. For instance, to identify objects in the physical world, Merck utilises its crypto-chemicals and crypto-objects patents, which enable machines to create secure identities based on the characteristics of those objects. This can be achieved through secure pigments, physical unclonable functions (PUFs), or even machine learning for image recognition.
To ensure a secure connection in the digital world, users can employ the Hash-Entropy-Enhancement patent. This technology allows organisations to generate reproducible, collision-resistant hashes from the fingerprint of an anchor. To enhance robustness, ease of use, and security, key features of the physical object—such as ambient information like temperature, pressure, time, and location—can now be integrated into the hash input transferred to a digital twin.
Merck’s patented anchoring technology securely binds a physical object to its digital twin. This process ensures that both representations of the object—the physical and the digital—remain in sync and are tamper-proof. M-Trust utilises collision-resistant hash functions to derive the digital twin from the unique physical characteristics of the object.
Web 3.0
Whilst Web 3.0 technology has yet to realise its full potential, it is still considered by many to be the future of the internet. The M-Trust platform enables customers to integrate product authenticity into their systems through smart contracts used to verify data authenticity and automate agreements within the value chain.
As Web 3.0 technology advances, the M-Trust portfolio will be important for enabling machines to match human capabilities in managing and controlling quality and enabling the creation of data-driven business opportunities. Merck envisages that its platform will act as a crucial building block for organisations to build tomorrow’s disruptive new business models, such as pay-per-part or pay-per-performance.
You can read more about Zebra’s manufacturing solutions here .
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