Hackathon: Smart Solutions for Water and Nature Management

Introduction

We got invited by a partner company to participate in a hackathon with the theme Smart Solutions for Water and Nature, which they called a Makathon. The Makathon is an open innovation event to which everybody is welcome to participate, regardless of expertise. We partnered with two companies: Axionomic and SPIE. Axionomic is a company specializing in innovation with block solutions. SPIE designs, develops, installs en maintains energy-efficient and environmentally friendly installations. SPIE created the software application 2Simple to help them manage all the assets they are responsible for.

Goals

Our main goal was to help SPIE recording their asset management transactions in such a way that they can use it as proof on how much time it took in relation to the availability of the assets. As a sub-goal, we as Avisi were looking for a long-term blockchain solution that is easy to deploy and flexible in usage.

When and where

The Makathon took place at the 3D Makerszone in Haarlem at the 3rd, 4th, and 5th of October 2018.

Three days of collaboration

We sent a representation of two people: Henzen van Dijk and Geert Liet. They were selected to create a fitting solution during the three-day hackathon. There were all sorts of prizes to be won by the teams that would realize the best solution.

The use-case for which our solution is designed is called 'slimmer schouwen' (which roughly translates into 'a smarter way of inspecting'). We focussed mainly information sharing and storage. An important part of this case is being filled by the asset management software created by SPIE. This software is capable of coordinating all actions needed for coordinating the management of assets. Avisi will set up an opensource blockchain solution, which should be made easily accessible for external software.

After the usual introductions, we discussed the process in which the solutions should collaborate. Together we came to the conclusion that the internal transaction log from 2Simple should be stored on the blockchain. After this first session, we started working on our solution.

At the end of day 1 the Avisi environment was up and running with the data format we discussed earlier. This solution consists of hyperledger fabric combined with hyperledger composer to create a flexible business process oriented setup. How we ended up with fabric and composer is explained in another blog.

The second day consisted of further research of the created blockchain environment to ensure its usability for different future purposes. Next to this research, there were several interaction moments in which the data model was changed. The tooling we selected made this very easy to do, and of course, it helped that there was no production data to migrate. On this day we succeeded in creating a transaction on the blockchain from the 2Simple software. This was made easy by creating a rest server, which communicated with the blockchain.

On the final day, we worked towards a presentable solution and we succeeded in deploying a stable testing environment on Google Cloud.

Conclusion and results

All in all, it was a successful hackathon in which we made new contacts and created a sustainable blockchain solution. We have created a solid basis on which SPIE can build for future projects and on which we can continue our collaboration.