IMEKO 2024 XXIV World Congress

Monday, 26 August 2024

In addition to the scientific program, TC6 Digitalisation is organizing a workshop gathering experts, stakeholders, and all other interested colleagues from academia, metrology institutes, and industry. The workshop aims to combine hands-on experience of digitalization in metrology with a look into the future of metrology in the digital era. What will metrology look like in Smart Cities? Will AI and remote services replace today's conformity assessment? How may a document-less quality infrastructure look like? These are the guiding questions we want to discuss and share with the attendees of the IMEKO World Congress 2024 in Hamburg, Germany.

Workshop schedule

Examples from regional working groups

The regional metrology organisations around the world have initiated activities in the area of digitalisation. Several have established dedicated working groups to coordinate regional efforts and collaborate on projects and activities.

In this workshop, examples from the Systema Interamericano de Metrología (SIM) and the European Associated of National Metrology Institutes (EURAMET) will give insights into recent and expected developments.

Capacity building using regional expertise and knowledge

Around thirty National Metrology Institutes from all over the world are embarked in a collaborative process to work on their solutions and developments towards the digital transformation of metrology in their countries. This process is organized through a PTB coordinated project “Metrology for Digital Transformation in International Cooperation (M4DT-IC)”. It is based on national projects within the topics digital transformation strategy, digital calibration certificate, and digital process management and on organizing the sharing of challenges, experiences, knowledge and solutions between participants. IMEKO guests are invited to learn about our experiences, results and expectations and, furthermore, to experience the eye-level approach of the CABUREK methodology (Capacity Building in Technical and Scientific Organizations Using Regional Knowledge).
Website: https://www.m4dt.ptb.de/

Demonstrators for hands-on experiences

An important part of the workshop, distinguishing it from the scientific programme of IMEKO, is the presentation of demonstrators. Several physical setups showcase recent developments and advances in digitalisation and metrology.

Metrology in Smart City

An air quality measurement setup illustrates concepts for sensor networks, the use of dashboards in metrology, as well as the limitations and opportunities of low-cost hardware. An additional demonstrator illustrates an approach for in-situ calibration in sensor networks by leveraging redundancy. This so-called “co-calibration” creates a “virtual reference” from a consistent set of sensors to calibrate the sensor under test. Sustainability in Smart City includes energy-efficient computations. Often, central computing resources (e.g., cloud based) offer high performance, but are also highly energy demanding. A demonstrator for the energy-efficient scheduling of tasks in a high-performance computing environment shows opportunities to improve this situation.

Digital quality infrastructure

QI-Digital initiative

Technological developments in areas such as AI, IoT and new manufacturing processes are currently progressing rapidly. Securing these technologies and a transformation towards a green and sustainable economy poses major challenges for the quality infrastructure (QI) and requires new regulatory provisions. To prevent this from leading to bureaucratic overload, the QI-Digital initiative (supported by BAM, DAkkS, DIN, DKE and PTB) is developing smart digital tools with which the bureaucratic burden can be sustainably reduced. These include the Digital Calibration Certificate (DCC), the Digital Certificate of Conformity (D-CoC), the digital accreditation symbol, QI-ready data spaces (Quality-X), and SMART Standards, in conjunction with the Digital Product Passport (DPP). A digital and data-based QI is the goal of our research and development work. This will enable a completely new type of quality assurance and unlock billions in potential savings.

Metrological services for AI

Artificial intelligence (AI) offers enormous potential for new applications, especially in medicine. However, according to the AI Act, these applications must be tested e.g. for safety and reliability before they are used. For this, PTB is expanding its established TraCIM testing platform towards fast and digital testing of medical AI algorithms. A prototype of this platform will be presented at the TC6 workshop demonstrating online testing of a medical use-case (AI-based heart segmentation) as an example.

Cloud & Blockchain technologies in metrology

Ebsihaa - Digital Calibration Certificates (DCC) as EBSI-based Verifiable Credentials (VC)

As part of EBSI Early Adopters Program, Random Red is aiming to enhance metrology across Europe by leveraging blockchain technology through the European Blockchain Service Infrastructure (EBSI). Supported by the European Commission and EU Member States, EBSI aims to establish a trusted digital ecosystem by providing secure and verifiable cross-border services. This initiative streamlines certification and accreditation processes, enhancing trust and reducing costs for both public and private sectors. By providing a tamper-proof, transparent system for issuing and verifying digital calibration certificates (DCC), Random Red facilitates cross-border recognition and interoperability.
https://ec.europa.eu/digital-building-blocks/sites/display/EBSI/Home
https://ec.europa.eu/digital-building-blocks/sites/display/EBSI/Random+Red+Ltd

MorphMetro – ensuring data confidentiality in ILC and PT procedures

The European Blockchain Service Infrastructure (EBSI) is also used for authentication in the MorphMetro project by providing a secure and verifiable digital framework for metrology. MorphMetro employs homomorphic encryption to maintain the confidentiality of laboratory and proficiency testing providers' data during interlaboratory comparisons (ILC) and proficiency testing (PT). Namely, during ILC and PT procedures, by using MorphMetro, only the side owning/entering the data has insight into its own input data (measured data, uncertainties, etc.), ensuring resistance to biased approaches and possible data manipulations throughout the entire process. This includes the whole procedure—from data input, during the calculations (which are carried out on encrypted data!), to the final results of the analysis. This ensures that the final results of ILC/PT are completely objective and unbiased.
https://morphmetro.eu/

Metrology Cloud for digital processes in the quality infrastructure

Processes in the future quality infrastructure will be mostly digitally automated. We here consider the process of applying for re-verification of a measuring instrument under legal regulation (i.e., in legal metrology). The Metrology Cloud initiative by PTB is a blockchain-based digital infrastructure for bodies and utilizers in the quality infrastructure. The demonstrator will illustrate the simple re-verification application process for a list of measuring devices from a customer to the market surveillance body. Another important feature demonstrated is digital representation of a measuring instrument. It contains QI-relevant information about the device, gathered from the distributed data set within the Metrology Cloud network. This representation is intended to illustrate the use of future digital product passports (DPP) in the QI.