Blockchain Quality Management System Pilot Completed By Swiss Federal Railway

Blockchain, Innovation, News | November 23, 2018 By:

Swiss Federal Railway (SBB), the national railway company of Switzerland, has completed a new proof-of-concept (PoC) of a blockchain quality management system.

SBB’s new system was developed in partnership with blockchain firm Linum Labs. It is designed to improve the current process of managing the credentials of workers, which is used to be fully manual and paper-based.

“SBB maintains thousands of construction sites with over 30,000 employees across Switzerland,” Linum Labs said in a blog post. “Each of these sites has a multitude of workers present from different construction companies and they all need to be medically fit and certified in order to work on the site. In addition, each site needs to record which worker was present and if they were correctly certified to work on that site. A self-sovereign blockchain based identity is well-suited for this use case because workers should be able to carry over their identity from one company to another and no specific company should own or manage it.”

During the 5-week testing phase, the system deployed ethereum-based identity management protocol uPort to enable railway workers, certification authorities and supervisors to have their own unique digital identities. A hash of the worker’s check-in / check-out activities is published to the blockchain so that the internal database can be audited.

According to SBB and Linum Labs, this pilot could be a part of the broader Swiss ID and digital identity discussion in Switzerland and serve as a model use case for issuing and verifying all types of organizational credentials.

“SBB and Linum Labs hope that the various components of this work can be fully open sourced in order to spur exploration of different use cases that build on the same simple interaction design: an authority issues a credential to an individual, which can be easily and securely verified with a tamper-proof log,” Linum said. “This could be applied from employees checking into worksites across the world, to the issuance or verification of driver’s licenses or university degrees.”