Collaborative Smart Items

Abstract

Business information systems provide computer support for decision making across huge data sets. Smart Items are miniaturized computer and sensing systems embedded into physical goods, items and assets. This paper proposes collaborative Smart Items for pushing business relevant computing as close as possible into the real world. Collaboration is enabled through an auction-based negotiation mechanism running distributed between the Smart Items. This mechanism serves as an abstraction across Smart Items in order to enable a common reasoning on business critical contexts as they may occur in logistics, safety and highly dynamic planning scenarios. In this paper, we investigate auction-based collaboration for Smart Items and present first experimental results. We conclude that auctions facilitate reliable business information processing even under harsh industrial conditions such as information loss or device failure.