[ad_1]
The IOTA Foundation, a non-profit organization behind the IOTA blockchain, is collaborating with the Japanese government on a project aimed at industrial infrastructure.
The foundation partnered on a project initiated by leading Japanese maintenance companies, Best Materia and IMC, IOTA representatives announced on October 27. The project is funded by the New Energy and Industrial Technology Development Organization, a national research and development agency operating under the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry.
According to an announcement, the initiative intends to implement artificial intelligence and distributed ledger technology in risk-based maintenance systems in power, industrial, petrochemical and oil refining plants.
Dominik Schiener, president and co-founder of IOTA, told Cointelegraph that the project aims to digitize manual processes with AI and deep learning in order to “predict when and which parts of the plant will require maintenance.” According to the executive, the implementation of AI and blockchain is expected to reduce disruptions, improve availability, and cut costs by cutting unnecessary inspections and repairs.
Schiener said that the IOTA Foundation was chosen as the partner of the project’s DLT platform. IOTA will be used to share immutable data, providing an infrastructure of trust and a “single point of truth” for different stakeholders, the executive noted. Schiener pointed out that the new system should benefit from IOTA’s zero-fee transactions on IOTA Tangle, stating:
“And, without paying a transaction fee, but having free data and valuable transactions in the network. IOTA will be used to hold the different parties responsible for the quality of the data they enter into the system.”
According to the announcement, the project includes a number of collaborating organizations including Best Materia, IMC, the High Pressure Institute of Japan, the Society of Chemical Engineers Japan, OMC, Lloyd’s Register and Yokohama National University.
In recent years, the New Energy and Industrial Technology Development Organization has been involved in various blockchain-related developments. In 2018, NEDO announced it was working on a blockchain-based data sharing system for the commerce industry. The project is a joint venture with Japanese IT giant NTT Data.
