D1.2 Report on business drivers and barriers of IoT interoperability and value added services

This report is a deliverable of the VICINITY [1] project, funded by the European Commission’s Directorate-General for Research and Innovation (DG RTD), under its Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme (H2020).

This deliverable reports on the elicitation, collection and analysis of business drivers and barriers to IoT interoperability. For this process, a survey and questionnaire approach has been used to interact with stakeholders, the results of which allowed the extraction of the key information and which was consolidated and analysed afterwards.

The results of this process show that stakeholders perceive the main strengths in VICINITY systems are in the integration of various standards and protocols, allowing innovation and offering a product which will be efficient, time and cost saving and which will minimize environmental impact and provide better quality of life.

The main barriers or inhibitors identified are: resistance to change from market players with existing products; loss of privacy and security; and compatibility and complexity of the potential solution developed.

The main results of this process are as follows:

  • Cross domain data-driven services offered to B2C and B2B end-users. In field of energy consumption stakeholders identified the need for Demand Side Management (DSM) including Renewable Energy Sources (RES) and innovative energy storages (see 5.1 and 5.2). Cross-domain benefits were identified in buildings environment where health assistance services (see 5.1 and 5.4) and advanced parking services could together take account of driver profiles to give priority to patients or cares (see 5.3 and 5.4);
  • Interoperability in IoT opens potential to use clean energy and further optimization of resources. Understanding how energy and resources (energy, water, heat, rooms occupancy, parking space) are produced and consumed or used creates potential for dynamic pricing, better invoicing and optimal usage or resources (see 5.1, 5.2, 5.3 and 5.4);
  • Data related issues at the data management level are on the forefront of the stakeholders’ minds. It is recognised that data ownership and regulation are the starting points for smooth interoperable services delivery (see 5.2 and 5.6).
  • Consumers are concerned about potential loss of privacy, security, service complexity and intrusion into their daily life (see 5.4, 5.5 and 5.6). Consumers have concerns regarding “big brother” phenomena (mostly elder people in health assistance) or collection of aggregated information (mostly employees in commercial buildings). Moreover, end-users prefer simple, easy-to-use services and devices which hide the complexity of the scenarios (see 5.3).
  • Regulatory compliance, bureaucratic obstacles and invisible barriers of institutions integration. These topics have great importance if the infrastructure is to be made interoperable both within and across domains. Technical challenges were identified especially in transport, energy and health domains (see 5.2, 5.6).

These are key aspects to be considered in the development, testing and deployment of the VICINITY neighbourhood.