Securing the wood supply chain within 5G-TIMBER

Securing the wood supply chain within  5G-TIMBER!

5G-TIMBER, a project coordinated by TALTECH, aims to help SME end-users optimize workflow, reduce waste and improve safety of the entire wood value chain. The wood value chain involves sawmills, factories and wood houses. Sensors (e.g., cameras) are exploited to track materials (logs, lumber/timber) and monitor equipment (sawmill/woodworking) in near-real time through the use of Digital Twins (DT).

DT enabled XR tools for use-cases:

The adoption of DT and 5G connectivity enables the implementation of manufacturing process operator support and machine servicing through the use of XR tools. TalTech is working on the creation of advanced User Interfaces to assist and train operators during wood houses product assembly procedures and sawmill machinery maintenance and servicing.

The applications ground on information provided by PLM DTs of product and production systems while providing workers with interactive three dimensional and Augmented Reality visualization of each task and assembly step. The application integrates information regarding different product components, and part specifications allowing, at the same time, to report nonconformities for each and save them in the PLM software.

The main goals, and key performance parameters for the provided applications, are the reduction of operator training time, improvement of production efficiency, and reduction of overall nonconformities.

AI supports use-cases such as

1. industrial machine’s fault prediction, Adopting predictive maintenance approaches requires real time data sharing between wood chain actors and machine manufacturers.
2.  design to production cycle optimization, Optimizing the design to production cycle requires role-based operator feedback collection.
3. structural health monitoring of wooden construction, Structural health monitoring requires zero-touch sensor data collection at supply, construction and owning stages
4.  network anomaly and attack detection.

You can see the full set of use cases here on the 5G-TIMBER page on the EFFRA Innovation Portal.

Altogether these use-cases set requirements for secure data collection, storage, processing and access control, a problem addressed by THALES with a Trusted Key Management (TKM) solution and the addition of an AI-based anomaly detection module.

Within 5G-TIMBER the TKM ensures the encryption and decryption of data collected by the sensors in the sawmills, factories and wood houses, making the relevant data accessible to authorized users according to role-based policies.  As the traditional wood supply chain opens extensively to new stakeholders such as machine manufacturers, wood carriers and woodhouse owners, the TKM must be watched for potential misuse by negligent or malicious actors. Therefore THALES is working on the development of an anomaly detection module. Diverse supervised and unsupervised temporal clustering techniques are currently being assessed to detect outliers in application logs and raise meaningful alerts. THALES thereby contributes to the resilience objective of Industry 5.0, ensuring that the extended wood value chain remains immune to data loss, theft, tampering or misuse.