In our era, data security, privacy and trust are becoming much more critical and challenging. During our initial requirement analysis in the first months of ICARUS, these challenges were clearly seen among the aviation stakeholders. Therefore, the stakeholders’ needs were further investigated through private interviews and surveys. Specifically, 88 responses were collected (14 from airports, 12 from airlines, 36 from other aerospace organisations and the rest from universities, health organisations, etc.) and 6 interviews were conducted with an airline, an aircraft manufacturer, a ground handler, a catering company, a weather data provider and a health organisation (to validate the ICARUS MVP). After two years in this project, we have gathered enough knowledge to better understand the aviation domain and extract more meaningful insights regarding how data affect these organisations.
Data Collection Aspects
The analysis of the responses of our survey has shown that the collection of data is vital for the organisations’ operations in the aviation domain. More specifically, 40% of the participating organisations have internal mechanisms for collecting data and 54% of them collect data using external sources (open and proprietary). Even though almost half of the participants stated that their organisations collect data from external sources, only 56% of the organisations are providing data to others. This yields a gap between supply and demand and thus, a data marketplace could decrease this gap, as 9 out of 10 participants have confirmed.
Data Providers and Consumers Perspectives
Although our findings illustrate that the exchange of data between the organisations is critical, the demand related to their data needs is higher than the data supply. This is where ICARUS can have a significant impact. Based on the responses we received, 80% of the data providers have shown interest in providing data that are directly related to the aviation (e.g. aircraft sensor data, airport traffic, etc.) and 20% in providing data that are indirectly related (e.g. data from health organisations, car rental companies, etc.), while 71% of the data consumers stated that are interested in the former category and 29% in the latter. Furthermore, more than 75% of data providers and 80% of data consumers that responded to the survey have shown interest in all functionalities that ICARUS aims to offer such as data anonymisation, data encryption, data analytics and visualisation.
Stakeholders needs: It all nails down to… Data Sharing and Trust
The establishment of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) has introduced one of the main challenges for organisations: the protection of sensitive personal information. Our analysis has shown that more than 90% of organisations consider data privacy and data security as their main challenges and that this is the main reason that prevents them from sharing their data with other organisations, even though they could benefit significantly from this. However, 95% of our participants have stated that they could trust a data sharing platform for uploading their data if it provides the guarantees that ICARUS aims to offer: (i) end-to-end data security and protection, (ii) anonymisation techniques for GDPR compliance, and (iii) guarantee specific agreements (smart-contracts) between the data providers and data consumers.
Conclusion
The requirement analysis we have performed, as well as the feedback we received by key aviation-related stakeholders, have illustrated that ICARUS can have a major impact and satisfy the needs of the aviation domain. At the time being, the ICARUS project is under development and is going to be completed by the end of 2020. A detailed analysis of the ICARUS stakeholders’ needs and requirements analysis is provided in Deliverable D1.3 (Updated ICARUS Methodology and MVP). Stay tuned for more updates!
Blog post prepared by UCY.
