Cyber-Physical Quality Control
Merck has introduced a digital trust platform to the market, aiming to enhance product safety and combat counterfeiting.
The pharmaceutical and technology company seeks to “translate human capabilities in quality control into more efficient, error-free machine processes that operate without human interaction.” To achieve this, Merck has launched the beta version of ‘M-Trust’, a platform designed to create digital twins that improve product quality and ensure authenticity.
“With growing expectations for quality control, companies must ensure safety and transparency across their industrial value chains while adhering to increasingly strict regulations,” says Laura Matz, Chief Science & Technology Officer at Merck. Traditionally, fully digitizing quality assurance processes has been challenging, as machine processes have struggled to match human precision and insight.
However, Matz asserts that this is now a thing of the past: “M-Trust is the first cyber-physical platform for digital trust on the market, enhancing traceability and product authenticity by digitally replicating human expertise in quality control processes. This groundbreaking technology is tailored for companies aiming to stay competitive in today’s interconnected world and is expected to pave the way for future business models.”
Functions
The platform is designed to enable companies to enhance product quality and guarantee originality by seamlessly linking the physical and digital worlds without the risk of manipulation. Built on Web 3.0 technology, it facilitates the creation of digital twins, boosting product safety and advancing the digitalization of quality control processes.
Merck leverages crypto-anchor technologies to link physical products with their digital identities, thereby improving traceability and quality assurance throughout the supply chain. The platform provides a working environment for developing digital systems that, according to Merck, replicate human expertise in quality control, enabling more efficient and error-free machine-to-machine (M2M) processes. Using this platform, machines can uniquely identify objects and provide verifiable information about them.
Merck further states that this capability allows product authenticity to be embedded directly into systems. The platform also supports the use of smart contracts—programming-based agreements that automatically verify data and execute transactions within a value chain.
The Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) offering includes software that integrates seamlessly into existing workflows and processes. It also features customizable crypto anchors to address different security needs and accompanying reading devices to ensure compatibility.
