AICHAIN

The project

AICHAIN a is a research project funded under SESAR 2020 Exploratory Research. The project proposed an innovative Digital Information Management (DIM) concept — the AICHAIN solution — that aimed at enabling the cyber-secured exploitation of large private data sets belonging to different stakeholders and containing valuable information for ATM operations. To overcome the stakeholders’ reluctance to share sensitive data, the exploitation would not be performed by exchanging the data itself, but by articulating an advanced privacy-preserving federated learning architecture in which neither the training data nor the training model need to be exposed. This is possible thanks to the innovative combination of two emerging DIM technologies: Federated Machine Learning (FedML) and Blockchain technologies.

Goals

The specific objectives of AICHAIN were structured in three areas of research:

• The DIM technological solution: to define the AICHAIN solution architecture as a potential SESAR technology enabler for the exploitation of private data value, and to implement a functional small-scale prototype for user validation and operational value experimentation.
• The operational value of the DIM solution: to demonstrate and quantify the operational value of the AICHAIN concept with an ATM use case in the area of A-DCB services.
• The governance & incentives aspects: to develop an incentive mechanism that addresses the motivational aspects of the data owners in order to facilitate the adoption and the effective utilisation of the AICHAIN concept.