(This is a liveblog of SEAP’s event where Jürgen Mössinger of Bosch talked about “Internet of Things: Challenges and Opportunities”)

About the Speaker

Jürgen Mössinger is the Head of Business Unit at Robert Bosch Engineering and
Business Solutions, India. He has an extensive background in embedded SW, IT and product development. He has been with Bosch since the last 19 years. Jürgen headed several positions in platform and customer product development for control units and was the spokesperson of the AUTOSAR Consortium in 2008. Currently he is heading a business unit at Robert Bosch Engineering and Business Solutions, responsible for products, services and solutions in the areas of Consumer Goods, Industrial Technology, Energy and Building Technology and Automotive Electronics. Beside the classical areas, Juergen is working on Smart Home, Smart City and Connected Industry (Industry 4.0).

About Bosch

Bosch group is a 40+ billion euro company with 280000 employees and 225 manufacturing sites. Automotive technology is their biggest sector, but they’re also in industrial sector, energy and building technoloyg, consumer goods – all over the world.

About the Internet of Things

The Internet of Things (IoT) is the term given to small computing devices embedded in anything an everything around us which will all be collecting data about their environment and which will be connected to the internet – allowing for data collection and analysis at a scale never before seen, and of course fine-grained control of the environment.

Things, in the IoT, can refer to a wide variety of devices such as heart monitoring implants, biochip transponders on farm animals, electric clams in coastal waters, automobiles with built-in sensors, or field operation devices that assist fire-fighters in search and rescue. Current market examples include smart thermostat systems and washer/dryers that utilize wifi for remote monitoring.

Opportunities and Challenges in IoT

Here is a random collection of interesting points made during the presentation:

• By 2020, 50 Billion devices will be connected to the internet. This forms the basis of IOT
• IoT will be everywhere. Huge potential: Smart Cities, Smart Homes, Smart Industry, Smart Wearables, Logistics (e.g. transport fleets, tracking)
• More than two thirds of consumers expect to buy IoT devices for their homes by 2019, and nearly half expect to buy wearable technology
• The wearables market is expected to have reached $1.5 billion in 2014
• By 2020 there will be over 100 million light bulbs and lamps worldwide that will be connected to the internet wirelessly
• Just 1% improvement in an industrial setting via use of IoT can result in billions of savings in operational costs
  • $30B fuel cost saving in aviation industry
  • $66B fuel cost saving in gas powered fleets
  • $63B productivity improvement in healthcare
  • $90B reduction in capital expenditure in oil and gas exploration and development
  • $27B productivity improvement in rail industry

Examples of IoT usage in Smart Homes:

• Appliance Information available on the cloud/smartphones
• Appliances operate automatically / efficiently
  • Through the use of scheduling or historical patterns or sensors
• Control House from Anywhere:
  • Customer is aware and fine-tunes the settings from anywhere

What all does IoT need?

• Sensors: heat, temperature, light and various other things
• Long battery life; can’t go around the house changing/charging batteries all the time
• GPS
• Local Network, Global Network
• Software to tie it all together

IoT means Big Data:

• 4.5 billion pieces of content are shared on Facebook every day
• Youtube users upload 100 hours of new video every minute
• By 2019 we’ll have 9.2 billion mobile phones
• iTunes receives about 100 billion app downloads in one quarter
• Huge in 3 different dimensions:
  • Volume: Raw amount of data generated
  • Velocity: speed with which the data is generated
  • Variety: the various different sources and types of data (sensor data, text, images, videos). Some of the data is structured and lot of it is unstructured.
• We will need next generation algorithms and tools to make sense of all this data so that we can generate usable insights
  • Software and Algorithms
  • Data Modelers
  • Data Visualizers
  • Data Architects
  • Business Analysts

Actual examples of IoT usage by Bosch:

• Fleet Management: 10% reduction of fuel cost per trip in underperforming routes – this was in Bangalore
• 25% reduction of testing time in Manufacturing
• 33% reduction in calibration cost of hybrid ECUs in automotive calibration
• 15% reduction in inventory holding costs in a supply chain

Smart Cities:

• This is a difficult area
• Lots of countries/cities claiming that they want to become smart
  • Narendra Modi has also announced Smart Cities initiative in India
    based on the PPP model (Public Private Partnership)
• Main problem is that these smart city initiatives do not have a business model. The investment has to be made by someone (the city, or the company in the PPP) and the benefits are reaped by others (the citizens). There is no direct return on investment for the investor
• No city has really solved this problem.

Smart Industry:

• We have already had 3 industrial revolutions:
  • 1st industrial revolution: the original mechanical industrial revolution
  • 2nd industrial revolution: the assembly line
  • 3rd industrial revolution: electronics
• Now, with IoT we are ready for the 4th.
  • Smart production: communication between each part and the machine:
    • Dynamic optimization of scheduling of processes and machines
    • Customized processing for each individual product
  • Horizontal Integration
    • Communication between:
      • Parts Suppliers
      • Transportation
      • Within the Factory
    • When all of these are talking to each other and we have data, new optimizations become possible
      • Example: +10 increase in productivity, -30% reduction in stock