Today, I have gone down to London to exhibit my AIgent research at the Digital Supply Chain Hubs networking event. It was great to present the concept to members of industry and government and receive their feedback on the idea and what the challenges are to adoption.
To go along with the exhbition, I produced a video of our real-world demonstrator that is operating in the lab.
The response was overly positive and they were excited and what the future might look like for supply chains. A few key take-aways in terms of adoption were:
- Evidencing the benefit of the approach over existing supply chain architectures.
- Working closely with the Digital Catapult, we will produce a series of publications detailing the benefits of AIgent-based supply chains with regards to resilience, responsiveness and sustainbility.
- Having trust and traceability between AIgents. How can I have confidence that I am talking to the right machine and it has the capability to print my job.
- This is an opportunity for the RiR to bring together the AIgent research with the opensource Web3.0 (Blockchain, Decentralised Identifiers and Verfiable Credentials) demonstrators of the DSCH NICE project that are building provenance preserving networks for rare-earth minerals.
- Cost of change and how would a supply chain transition an AIgent way of working.
- We will be investigating how a manufacturing system could support and slowly transition from one mode of working to another and whether their is a loss in productivity during the transition and whether there are ways to mitigate this.
- What else could they talk about?
- We will be exploring how the machines can co-ordinate maintenance in order to minimise drops in sovereign manufacturing capability.
It was a great day and I look forward producing research and demonstrators that can answer these questions.