A VC in Vacationland

Three years ago, I wrote a Blog on Dust Networks and the idea that one could know where their product was at all times using motes technology.

Image by binuxvia Flickr

Motes are still very much around and under development in a variety of industry settings, although a Google search on the subject yields mostly academic papers and not operational supply chain technology solutions. But the concept of inexpensive, real time tracking of products in a supply chain remains a tantalizing subject. And now we have related technologies that may show equal promise in this space–digital ants.

There was a fascinating article in MSN recently on Digital Ants and their role in increasing security in computers. Scientists from Wake Forest University and the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory have created an army of digital ants (as well as their superior officers,sergeants and sentinels) to search out viruses, worms and other mal-ware on your computer. The ants are programmed to sense very basic activities, such as a connection rate to a web site.  The evidence is then collected and evaluated for security threats or infections. In this manner, new viruses are attacked at a more micro level, without knowing exactly where they are programmed to impact the computer hard drive.

The whole ecosystems for digital ants mimics the real world ant colony.  Digital ants relay any suspicious behavior to a digital sentinel, a program designed to monitor a computer network. The sentinel sorts through the data gathered by the ants, and passes it on to a digital sergeant, who alerts their human counterpart to take action. If particular kinds of ants find more problems, then more of these ants are created to intensify monitoring of the network. The beauty of using digital ants instead of traditional anti-virus programs is that the ants are always on duty, unlike the set-schedule scans with current virus software.

The same concept could work in tracing anomalies in supply chain operations.  The digital ants could be programmed to sense one particular fact, such as a delivery delay, in multiple operating systems–production, inventory, shipping, carriers, etc.–for a particular order, or product within an order. The information could be used to populate a business intelligence dashboard for supply chain professionals to monitor.  The difference would be that the information would be much more robust and real-time than current BI solutions.

There are numerous other applications for motes and digital ant technologies in monitoring and managing supply chains.  The next generation of supply chain software should take full advantage of these and related technologies to drive further cost saving and service improvements in operations. So far, no one has announced such a leap forward, unless my readers know of one? 

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