Retail Business Case. In this section we exemplify a business case from the retail domain that shows the beneficial effects of the IoT-based use cases investigated in work package 7 of the IoT-A project. The complete details can be found in D7.1 and D7.2 and the prototypical implementation and evaluation in the project’s retail living lab is expected for the end of 2012. The use case shows how IoT technologies like sensor technologies built into consumer electronic devices and NFC tags coupled with a concrete architecture derived from the Reference Architecture can provide useful meta-information to the customer to enhance the overall shopping experience and at the same time significantly reduce the costs for consulting that sales personnel in the retail stores need to conduct today, as there are no such systems in widespread use. The use case demonstrates what a direct human-to-machine interaction enabled by IoT-A would be like. As such, the overlap between the existing Internet and the future Internet of Things is shown. From a business perspective, the use case is primarily interesting, because the NFC-based product information has the potential to reduce the consultation time of the sales personnel in the store. In order to make the business case somewhat more complex, we also integrate the core functionality of use case scene 7 (sensor based quality control) of D7.2 into the case and assume that both scenes are interconnected, because they are based on a common architecture, namely a concrete architecture based on the IoT-A Reference Architecture. This sensor based quality control scene shows how sensors monitor perishable goods in a store. Depending on the luminance, humidity, and temperature of the environment, the estimated future quality of the perishable products is determined and prices are reduced, even before a perceivable degradation of quality occurs. By applying this sensor based quality control and combining it with dynamic pricing, it is ensured that the goods are sold before quality degradation is likely to occur. From a business and industry perspective, the scene demonstrates two important retail related concepts: dynamic pricing and quality control of perishable goods. Dynamic pricing as a real-time tool for price optimization strategies has always been crucial for profit maximization. In contrast to the state of the art, dynamic pricing in the featured use case is not performed based on static information such as best before end dates in the transaction...
