IDM for Things

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IDM for Parts – May 16, 2024
Identity Management for Things: Complex Supply Chain Integrity
I like older cars, I enjoy tinkering. Whenever I consider buying an older car I like to know about its repair history, so I ask for the Carfax. It is nice to have some background, but the worst that can happen is that it doesn’t start, or it stops when it shouldn’t. I check the key systems myself. But airplanes are different. Each component of the aircraft has a particular manufacturer, a specific build date and lot number, expected service life, maintenance schedule and history, and failure rate. Sometimes airlines buy parts from older aircraft – the provenance of each piece must be verified. It could be something as simple as a hinge on an alerion, a valve in the fuel system, or a bolt on a panel. Given the cost of a certified part (and the margin on a counterfeit but similar item), the temptation for an unscrupulous dealer to swap in an almost-good-enough piece of technology and pocket the difference is large. How can buyers know that they are getting what they paid for?
This is the subject of identity management for things. The maintenance record and ownership history are part of the identity of the item. Identity is the third dimension of computing. The first was the simple process of calculation, the reason computers came around in the first place. In the 1950s businesses applied computers to solve business problems – where you had fifty payroll clerks calculating a paycheck, you could automate some of that process and save a lot of time. The largest innovation from that era was the development of higher-level languages – COBOL and the like to improve the productivity and accuracy of the programmers. More complex manufacturing in the 1960s drove processes to handle the vast number of parts involved – a 747 has one million parts. Two of the innovations from that era were bill of materials processing (the predecessor of enterprise resource planning which begat supply chain management) and SML (simplified markup language) for managing the documentation for the build of a 747. GML begat SGML which begat HTML and all the languages we use to describe metadata.
Note that numbers in the first era are dimensionless. Parts have a time sequence, but it is linear. In the 1990s we began to use computers to process people – payroll and benefits organizations merged into Human Resources Department and developed applications that track employees, which enters the third dimension – people change over time, unlike parts or numbers. When a person moves from one job to another it is not like they quit and then got hired: some of their permissions have to end when the leave the old job, others will have to stick around for a while till they finish a project, yet others will have to stay indefinitely. Some new permissions may have to be granted immediately, while yet others may be held until some other process can finish – training, a background check, or some other certification.
Now we have complex parts that can have a complex history, like aircraft components. Some times a broker will sell the engine from an older aircraft, but what does the broker know about the components in that engine? The refit of an engine begins to make the bill of materials process look like the identity management process. And so far nobody has developed a comprehensive identity management solution that can handle parts.

We are witnessing the convergence of Identity Management with Bill of Materials Processing (BOMP). Can Identity Management save advanced manufacturing systems? Listen to this -
Let me know what you think in the comments below or at wjmalik@noc.social
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