After 34 months from the start of the project (April 2018), all the deliverables have been completed and the milestones have been fulfilled.
While the first year of the project focused on deploying the technology that would be the base of the project and on planning and organizing the activities to bring Airsensus (former Shoganai) to reality, the second year and the extended period have demonstrated the capacity of the product as it was conceived. The first commercial solution was installed on a commercial aircraft and the certification process was checked. Checks using real flying data were not possible to be performed since the aircraft was grounded because of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Taking a proactive approach, Airplane Solutions, alongside the pilot 2 and pilot 3 customers, agreed on continuing with the development using simulated data as the source to test and check the developments. This simulated data have played a critical role in the finalization of the activities since it allowed the project to adapt to the new situation and create a great part of the value that was targeted at the beginning.
In the following lines, a description of the lines of work is included.
1. Project Management: We use a value-based, iterative approach under which business needs and solutions evolve through the collaborative effort of self-organizing, cross-functional teams. This well-known methodology is called Agile/SCRUM and aims to achieve in each iteration a consumable solution.
2. Main developments in the architecture of Airsensus:
- Inclusion of micro-services for processing the telemetry and detect the operational events that are sent to the Blockchain platform.
- Development of proprietary databases for Airport Charges calculations and Navigation Charges Calculation.
- Improvements into the Frontend.
- Inclusion of microservices to support the data coming from the simulation software.
3. Main developments linked to the Blockchain platform have been:
- Airsensus was updated to version 1.4.4 of Hyperledger. This was the most stable version so far, so it was decided to update the infrastructure despite the deviation in time.
- Architecture improvements: Improve of nodes, ordering service, and inclusion of private channels for organizations such as airlines and suppliers that exchange services and don’t want other airlines and/or suppliers to have access to (privacy improvements).
4. Regarding Certification (EASA):
- B737-400 certification (HAT) – March 2019.
- B737-800 certification (LAV) – December 2019 (pending tests for the final approval of the modification on the first aircraft. Approximately 90% completed.)
5. Regarding the No-Hardware version (piloted for Airbus):
- Inclusion of modifications in the architecture to support the data ingestion from a data lake
6. Regarding the aircraft models included in Airsensus:
- Boeing 737 family;
- Airbus A320 family:
7. In the commercialization landscape:
- First commercial contract for the deployment of the Shoganai solution into 7 B737-800 aircraft of Albastar (LAV), a charter company that is working with us in the development of pilot #2.
- In October 2019 the product Shoganai was selected as part of the Airbus acceleration program called “The Bizlab”.
8. Dissemination activities:
- New website (February 2020);
- New corporate image and decks;
- Partnership with big companies that support the start-up environment (accelerators);
- Assistance to events and fairs.
