Vision and Challenges for Realising the Internet of Things

esent one step in the supply chain, receiving their supplies from construction related suppliers,
which are generally represented by medium to large enterprises. Each time when starting
maintenance and refurbishment work, project based contracts of changing actors are defined,
establishing a unique and ad-hoc group of craftsmen and the customer. A certain sequence of
different craftsmen work steps need to be considered and harmonised, while the project is
generally coordinated by a relatively inexperienced customer or specific work managers (e.g.
architects, main contractors). Nevertheless, the customer’s work specification is quite general,
often not able to detail the current state of the existing building or installations. The craftsmen
work represents a service type product, while also physical products are prefabricated and are
resold to the customer. Long warranty and maintenance periods need to be assured, whereas
there is often only very little documentation of work available. Subsequently, also future work
and product replacement lacks information concerning the existing installations. Moreover,
fairly no feedback can be given from craftsmen to customers or from industry to craftsmen in
case of deficient products or in case of potential improvement measures. In addition, most
customers are not prepared to handle craftsmen related information electronically.
2.3 Key Challenges within the Analysed Enterprise Environments
The workflows in both analysed enterprise environments are characterised by crossorganisational
interaction, requiring the operation of highly dynamic and ad-hoc relationships.
At the same time, only a very limited ICT support is available and especially facing the
following key challenges when aiming at an improvement of the cross-organisational information
exchange and planning & control of process execution:
The supply chains are generally characterised by temporary supplier-customer relationships
and are missing efficient and at the same time trusted models for information exchange.
The business scenarios include a large number of SME type actors in open and distributed
network topologies (i.e. chain, star & general collaborative network topologies) and are specifically
lacking an integrated ICT support.
A direct electronic access to product related data from previous or later steps in the SME
type chains is generally not feasible, starting from 2nd tier supplier to customer relationships
(i.e. beyond one step up/down).
There is a dilemma of product related data exchange over several steps in a supply chain.
The regular provision of certain information could jeopardise the competitiveness of chain
members, leading to reluctance towards a standardised and open data exchange.
SMEs do not often accept models for ICT based information exchange that are centralising
system governance and storage of access details, while being driven by large enterprises in a
business domain.
Currently available ICT based information exchange models within SME environments rely
on synchronous query-response behaviour, difficult to be applied for distributed and decoupled
mobile work in terms of security, trust and costs.
The basic assumption is that by employing ICT based functionality, which is provided by one
or several mobile networked devices it will become possible to decentralise the intelligence
that need currently be kept within heterogeneous decoupled systems. This decentralisation is
envisaged to facilitate interaction of actors and at the same time disburden the actors from
non-added-value tasks within the workflow. The process related groupings of such ICT functionalities
is considered as a Networked Devices Enabled Intelligence, representing a key enabler
to cope with identified challenges.
2.4 Application Cases for a Networked Devices Enabled Intelligence
The project is based on the assumption that with higher levels of technology, like the vision of
the Internet of Things, the level of organisational complexity and need for central initiatives
can be decreased. This could even facilitate implementation and increase acceptance [Cute-
Loop09]. Based on the analysed enterprise environments and taking into account the key
challenges several application cases for a networked devices enabled intelligence were elaborated.
These application cases are considered as both drivers for elaborating new technology
enabled business scenarios as well as test cases for validating practical applicability and readiness
of IoT related technologies.
CERP-IoT – Cluster of European Research Projects on the Internet of Things
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