Mining for insight in the economy of things? Check your toolkit

Cars, conference rooms and tractors would like to play too, please

The Internet of cute little cars

These use cases run all the way down the supply chain to the consumer level, where IoT technologies are changing the way that physical assets are distributed and owned. For example, car sharing companies such as Car2Go have redefined car ownership for people in densely-populated cities. They are equipped with sensor technologies that know where the cars are, and allow people to book them with mobile apps.

These cars are rented by the minute, making extremely short haul trips feasible, maximising usage rates on the vehicles while catering to a customer base that may never choose to own a vehicle while they live in the city. It’s a sensor-based marketplace for physical assets, managed in real time.

Asset management is a big area for IBM when it comes to the IoT explained Andy Stanford-Clark, a distinguished engineer in the IoT function at IBM. “Examples include using data gathered over a period of time to do predictive analytics to work out when something is likely to fail,” he said, “for example a pump, or light bulb, or the brake pads on your car.”

Closely linked to this is building and facilities management, where sensors can be used to make better use of key assets. “We're seeing a lot of interest from companies who aim to provide a better service,” he said, “such as hot desk management, predictive elevators, or guiding visitors to a meeting room.” This, again, can lead to the more efficient usage of physical assets that may otherwise go to waste.

Sensors at the heart of it

For physical assets to be recognised by the digital network, sensors are a key technology. After all, they must somehow be indexable and readable. For years, RFID tags have been emerging as a means of tracking physical assets in all kinds of environments and marshalling them through the supply chain.

“We are seeing it more and more now in terms of clothing and tags on things in stores. Not small items - not Mars Bars just yet. But certainly coats and shirts on a rail,” said Stanford-Clark. “Staff can do a stock survey by using their wand and sweeping an area of the store in one go.”

The advantage there comes in knowing where your stuff is, but the real trick lies in working that into your workflows and enterprise systems. There’s no point knowing that a crate of shirts is stuck 50 miles up the road at a distribution centre if you need it here, now, to sell.

These workflows can get sophisticated with the right sensors, said Ashton. “You put a two cent RFID tag on a tray of peaches, and machine vision system on a digital micro camera, and a sensor detecting air pressure change in an HVAC system when a door opens, and they all communicate via the Internet,” he said.

“A line of code in the cloud somewhere could tell a system in a retailer’s corporate office how ripe the fruit is in a store thousands of miles away,” he suggested. Maybe that would even change the price. Suddenly, what before was simply trackable now becomes indexable.

This may all sound enticing, but how those architectures are structured will be critical. The Internet of things is unlikely to be a flat collection of objects, all yammering away at each other. Instead, imagine something with the same hierarchies found in the existing Internet. Stanford-Clark envisages what he calls a “fog” at the edge of the cloud, consisting of communities of physical assets.

“You may find devices talking to each other locally, sending to HQ a running commentary about what’s happening that could be overridden by policy,” he argued.

Architectures

For all of these physical assets to connect together and do useful things for each other, though, they have to be equipped with some kind of interoperability standard, especially given that at least some of them will probably be legacy devices adapted to work with the IOT.

“We are in this divergent space at the moment, where we let many flowers bloom,” Stanford-Clark said. Some companies are considering HTTP as a communication protocol between the devices, although he considers it inappropriate for most IoT use. Others are looking at ARM’s CoAp, while the XMPP messaging protocol and MQTT (a messaging protocol which Stanford-Clark fathered) are also on the table.

Such protocols represent only a thin application layer of an OSI-style stack for the IoT. Underneath, there are physical transportation layers like wired and radio, together with different subsets of communication protocols, such as Zigbee or IP.

At the very top sit projects like HyperCat, a specification for describing IoT services. These upper layers will support at least some of the processes that physical assets may require to do their job.

A blockchain of things?

Today, the marketplaces for physical assets offered by companies like Car2Go are centrally managed in a kind of hub and spoke system. That may not always be the case, though. There are other technologies in the stack that offer the opportunity to manage these physical assets in decentralized ways, once they have been made to tell us things and take instructions. Blockchain technology – the technology underpinning bitcoin – may become instrumental here, because it can be used to cryptographically verify information from lots of different devices. Instead of embedding bitcoin transactions, you’re embedding the status of uniquely identifiable physical assets in the chain.

Some promising startups are emerging here. One of them is Skuchain, a company that will use the blockchain to manage physical supply chains. “Our mission is to build the Internet of SKUs, where SKUs carry their provenance, maintain their integrity and provide realtime visibility as they travel downstream,” said Skuchain CEO Srinivasan Sriram. “By doing so, we enable new forms of friction­free commerce that were heretofore not possible and at the same time bring efficiencies into the existing supply chain.”

The firm will also expose its underlying platform as an API that large producers, niche supply chains, brands and others can use to bring realtime visibility into the supply chain. A typical application? Perhaps certifying the provenance of electronics, to ensure that no conflict minerals were used. Or verifying that chemicals came from a certain upstream supplier, for health and safety compliance reasons.

The IoT will continue encroaching on industries that have been unashamedly physical for decades, or centuries. It may not happen quickly – advocates often face an uphill struggle dealing with entrenched businesses that are happy with the status quo – and it will happen in fits and starts, rather than all at once. But like water, disruption has a funny way of eventually creeping into every open space, and filling it. ®