Business Model Design and Architecture for the Internet of Everything

Abstract

Smart devices and cyber-physical systems, which are interconnected to IT systems and services, form the basis for the arising Internet of Everything, opening up new economic opportunities for its participants and users beyond its technological aspects and challenges. While today's e-business scenarios are mostly dominated by a few centralized online platforms, future business models, which will be feasible for the Internet of Everything, need to address special requirements. Such business models, e.g., leveraging the possibilities of smart cities, need to cope with arbitrary combinations of products and services orchestrated into complex products in a highly distributed and dynamic environment. Furthermore, these arbitrary combinations are influenced by real-time context information derived from sensor networks or IT systems, as well as the users' requirements and preferences. The complexity of finding the optimal product/service combination overstrains users and leads to decisions according to the principle of adverse selection (i.e., choosing good enough instead of optimal). Such e-business models require an appropriate underlying value generation architecture that supports users in this process. In this paper, we develop a business model that addresses these problems. In addition, we present the Distributed Market Spaces (DMS) software-system architecture as a possible implementation, which enables the aforementioned decentralized and context-centric e-business scenario and leverages the commercial possibilities of smart cities.

Examining potential benefits and challenges associated with the Internet of Things integration in supply chains

“…In addition, incorporating new technologies into existent business environments, structures, and models has always been a challenge. This also remains the case when the IoT is implemented (Dijkman et al, 2015;Hognelid and Kalling, 2015;Pfisterer et al, 2016). Other challenges may be linked with internal and external technological integration Buntz, 2015;Gnimpieba et al, 2015;Hussain, 2016;Valmohammadi, 2016;Bröring et al, 2017).…”

“…Enterprises must clearly understand how value will be created, delivered and captured considering financial return as a key in IoT. Also, they should evaluate the differences between business models from others applications and IoT application where combination of services and products are delivered through smart products within dynamic, wider and complex environments (Dijkman et al, 2015;Hognelid and Kalling, 2015;Pfisterer et al, 2016). Furthermore, the technical and technological integration challenges (mean = 4.05) was seen and the fourth top challenge to the IoT implementation.…”

Generic UIs for Requesting Complex Products Within Distributed Market Spaces in the Internet of Everything

“…Distributed Market Spaces (DMS) [18], refers to a model of commercial exchange that supports market participants in making distributed transactions of complex products. Figure 1 illustrates the conceptual structure of the DMS, showing the involved parties, their roles and relationships on the left, and on the right, the DMS functional structure with its components and high-level interfaces, represented through the sets of exchanging messages, required to support the interactions along involved parties.…”

“…Distributed Market Spaces (DMS) proposed by [18], refers to a IoE exchange environment that supports market participants (i.e., consumers and producers) in making (distributed) transactions for complex products. But, to build a complex product requests on their own, the users need an alternative to express their demand for a particular complex product, in a way, that is interpretable by the DMS.…”

A Comprehensive Framework for the Analysis of Industry 4.0 Value Domains

“…This implies giving the customer the constant opportunity to become part of the value creation process through the development of tailored services [17], requiring not only the grouping together of companies and value creation functions [18][19][20] but also the development of new value creation mechanisms, that is, new business models [16,21]. Moreover, Industry 4.0 s goal is sustainable success in a mass customization market [22], where customers increase variant diversity [23] designed to their individual specifications [16,24] and without paying a high price premium [25]. Within this context, the future of an enterprise competing within an Industry 4.0, mass customization environment, depends on their sustainability, where the latter can only be achieved by the manufacturing efficiency of the smart factory-based Industry 4.0 transforming processes [16,26,27].…”