Integrated Billing Solutions in the Internet of Things

The Internet of Things is one of the most promising technological developments in information technology. It promises huge financial and nonfinancial benefits across supply chains, in product life cycle and customer relationship applications as well as in smart environments. However, the adoption process of the Internet of Things has been slower than expected. One of the main reasons for this is the missing profitability for each individual stakeholder. Costs and benefits are not equally distributed. Cost benefit sharing models have been proposed to overcome this problem and to enable new areas of application. However, these cost benefit sharing approaches are complex, time consuming, and have failed to achieve broad usage. In this chapter, an alternative concept, suggesting flexible pricing and trading of information, is proposed. On the basis of a beverage supply chain scenario, a prototype installation, based on an open source billing solution and the Electronic Product Code Information Service (EPCIS), is shown as a proof of concept and an introduction to different pricing options. This approach allows a more flexible and scalable solution for cost benefit sharing and may enable new business models for the Internet of Things.