The IOTA Foundation, a non-profit entity that built the IOTA blockchain – has reportedly forged an alliance with the Japanese authorities, to work on a project focusing on industrial infrastructure.

Specifically, both parties will be jointly working on a project, kickstarted by the top-tier, Japan-based maintenance firm – Best Materia and IMC, and receiving financial support from the New Energy and Industrial Technology Development Organization – a country-level R&D entity operating under the supervision of Japan’s Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry.

Particularly, the project reportedly has a primary goal of finalizing the implementation of A.I and DLT risk-based maintenance solutions across sectors – power, industrial, petrochemicals and oil refining plants.

Dominik Schiener, chairman and co-founder of IOTA, reportedly remarked that the project looks to complete the digitization process of manual steps, using  AI and deep learning, in an attempt to “predict when and which parts of the plant are going to require maintenance.”

AI and blockchain are reportedly expected to bring down the amount of outages, enhance availability together with cutting down costs, via removing unneeded inspections and repairs.

Schiener additionally revealed that the IOTA Foundation was selected to be the project’s DLT platform partner, where it will offer immutable data sharing, setting up a trust infrastructure and “single point of truth” for numerous stakeholders. 

“And, without paying a transaction fee, but having free data and value transactions in the network. IOTA will be used to make the different parties accountable for the quality of the data they put into the system.”