On January 27th, Professor Georg Borges spoke at the international "Conference on Shaping a globally secure Industrie 4.0 Ecosystem". Under the heading "The automation of trust in industrial contractual relationships", he and Benjamin Korth from Fraunhofer IML presented the latest research findings of the "Legal-Testbed Industry 4.0" project, which is now receiving further funding from the Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy (BMWi).

Since January, the Institute for Legal Informatics has been working on a new project called " Automated Trust Management in Industry 4.0", in which scientists are pursuing an innovative approach, that is geared towards achieving mutual trust as a basis for new contractual relationships. Building contractual relationships, which are always relationships of trust, usually takes time and effort. This in turn is often accompanied by high costs.

The project, as an addition to the already existing Legal-Testbed Industry 4.0 project, aims to automate this process. Through software that automatically procures standardised trust-relevant information and assesses the trustworthiness of potential business partners, the trust building process could be facilitated and thus significantly accelerated.