Innovative usage of a public web portal with the vision of an "Intelligent Marketplace"

Abstract

In 2020, there will be 50 to 100 billion devices connected to the internet. Internet of Things (IoT), a concept of connecting things with other things or people will be a fundamental IT strategy in the future. Big companies, like IBM, SAP or Hitachi, see the potential and support researchers in this area. The results of the current researches focus on technical guidelines, modeling tools or security. What is missing is a use case, how in an affordable way private users can use Internet of Things with use cases and examples. This master thesis picks up the idea of combining cloud computing with IoT, which results in an intelligent marketplace: A public web portal in the area of intelligent buildings, which connects customers, suppliers and things. It reduces the time and costs of business transactions by reducing interaction steps. The document starts with a theoretical framework which explains terms like IoT or cloud computing. A short introduction of recent researches or portal solutions provides stimulating inputs for the main part of this thesis: The design of the public web portal. Based on the application domain intelligent buildings possible scenarios are analyzed and then optimized by the use of a portal solution connected to the devices/things. The involved devices are from the areas household appliance and house installation. The design of the portal solution starts with an UML use case diagram explaining what the connected users can do with the solution. Based on this, an UML class diagram gives an overview about the elements which interact in the entire portal environment to support the possible use cases. The next section focuses on the GUI (graphical user interface) design and answers, how users interact with the portal. The last section combines the topics and shows a possibility how to set up the portal solution via Amazon AWS. To prove the research, interviews with different experts of a domain were conducted. Beside hints for improvement, also possible next steps to win investors are listed.