Economists have estimated the global size of the black market ‘shadow economies’ for goods and services as high as $16.5T per year, comprising over 22% of global GDP.* Black market trade in goods is well documented, with serious global counterfeit and gray market issues ranging from branded products to life-critical items such as pharmaceuticals and implantable medical devices. Unfortunately, just like the use of the web for nefarious activity, there are trillions of dollars in global trade in illegal, illicit, and unauthorized items. Thus, the connected systems, or ‘surface items’ in the airplane represent the tip of the iceberg in terms of potential connectivity for the airplane as a whole, accounting for less than 1% of the total parts, which include many safety-critical and life-critical components. Clearly, only a small portion of these parts are directly addressable and traceable back to the original and history of that part.Įach of these physical components have a history that is both physical and digital, with specifications, purchase orders, testing parameters, acceptance criteria, manufacturing dates, etc. A Boeing 737 has 367,000 parts, manufactured by hundreds of suppliers and thousands of 2nd tier suppliers, and jumbo jets such as the Boeing 747 and Airbus A380 are reported to have as many as four million separate parts.
However, the airplane is also comprised of hundreds of thousands of individual physical components, subsystems, materials, and assemblies. The airplane itself is a uniquely identifiable physical entity that allows for address assignments in the various communication links. An airplane is in many ways a connected ‘device’ with multiple communication links to the Internet, various control points, navigation systems, and input/output channels. Take for example a commercial airplane manufactured by Boeing or Airbus. Deep items consist of trillions of loosely associated physical items which are only partially identifiable or connected.
However, there also exists a vast network of ‘deep items’, analogous to the deep web.
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