A Big Data Intelligence Marketplace and Secure Analytics Experimentation Platform for the Aviation Industry

Over the last years, the impacts of the evolution of information integration, increased automation and new forms of information management are also evident in the aviation industry that is disrupted also by the latest advances in sensor technologies, IoT devices and cyber-physical systems and their adoption in aircrafts and other aviation-related products or services. The unprecedented volume, diversity and richness of aviation data that can be acquired, generated, stored, and managed provides unique capabilities for the aviation-related industries and pertains value that remains to be unlocked with the adoption of the innovative Big Data Analytics technologies. The big data technologies are focused on the data acquisition, the data storage and the data analytics phases of the big data lifecycle by employing a series of innovative techniques and tools that are constantly evolving with additional sophisticated features, while also new techniques and tools are frequently introduced as a result of the undergoing research activities. Nevertheless, despite the large efforts and investments on research and innovation, the Big Data technologies introduce also a number of challenges to its adopters. Besides the effective storage and access to the underlying big data, efficient data integration and data interoperability should be considered, while at the same time multiple data sources should be effectively combined by performing data exchange and data sharing between the different stakeholders that own the respective data. However, this reveals additional challenges related to the crucial preservation of the information security of the collected data, the trusted and secure data exchange and data sharing, as well as the robust access control on top of these data. The current paper aims to introduce the ICARUS big data-enabled platform that aims provide a multi-sided platform that offers a novel aviation data and intelligence marketplace accompanied by a trusted and secure “sandboxed” analytics workspace. It holistically handles the complete big data lifecycle from the data collection, data curation and data exploration to the data integration and data analysis of data originating from heterogeneous data sources with different velocity, variety and volume in a trusted and secure manner.