Economy of Things Research Updates

At Bosch Connected World 2020, some of the world’s most innovative and influential Internet of Things (IoT) leaders share novel strategies, best practices, and instructive case studies relating to IoT-driven products, services, and solutions.

The publicly funded iBlockchain project (short for “Industrial Blockchain”) aims to comprehensively and systematically research solutions for industrial applications based on blockchain technologies. The six research partners in total, led by the coordinating partner Ruhr-Universität Bochum, also include Bosch. The company’s role in the project is to ensure a strong practical focus on industrial manufacturing processes. Firstly, this means developing an Industry 4.0 demonstrator. Secondly, Bosch will be helping design and then implement scalable basic technologies (e.g. second layer).

Prototypical DLT applications already exist, but the technical requirements for sustainable business models are still missing, for example when it comes to scalability: Scalability is one of the great challenges with DLT, because ideally tens of thousands of transactions per second have to be processed in real time. This is very memory and energy intensive. The team of the strategic advance engineering project "Economy of Things" has set up the open source project "Direct State Transfer" (DST) as a solution to implement the so-called second-layer protocol "Perun".

Bosch, EnBW and Siemens have jointly developed a Proof of Concept that makes the future of the EoT tangible: A Bosch-modified e-car communicates via blockchain with a Siemens traffic light to gain access to a site and then with an EnBW charging pole for the loading process. The transactions required for identification, authorization and payment are processed autonomously on a blockchain via a Smart Contract, which contains the contract conditions for the vehicle, traffic light and charging station. A technological milestone that was only possible thanks to the proactive, open and cooperative approach of the three partners. "It took less than three months from idea to implementation. This speed could become a success factor in in setting up an EoT," says Christian Heise, deputy project director EoT at Bosch.

On the importance of system-view centric validation for the design and operation of a crypto-based digital economy.

The idea is to streamline and tailor the entire process to customers’ needs, so they can select, reserve, and pay for recharging services as they see fit. The entire transaction – reservation and payment – is a fully automated blockchain operation.

Event designed for multinational corporates who want to deeply immerse into the topic of decentralized platforms and their fundamental implications for different industries.