There are many potential application domains for the Web of Things, stretching across many industry sectors. This page will attempt to structure these domains and link to further details for the associated use cases. Your help is sought in expanding these pages. Please bring questions and comments to the public mailing list with the subject line prefix [use cases]

Please note we decided to gradually merge the use cases into the deliverable on use cases and requirements

Links to external work on use cases

Use case writing style

To sync the writing styles we might try to put forward some key questions to answer by the use cases. This might also provide some initial structuring and helps by reflecting what aspects we would like to consider for WoT technologies.

Here are some key questions for each use case to address:

What is the user motivation for the use case
How does this translate to a technical Description
What application domains are related (e.g. referring to the taxonomy)
What interaction pattern with or btw things can be observed
Which Aspects are not considered

Please let us know you have further questions or alternatives.

Here is a worked example:

Smart control of washing machine

What is the user motivation for the use case

Joan has a heavy load of washing to do. She decides to run it over night to take advantage of the lower power prices. She loads the clothes into the washing machine and selects the economy operation mode. She has previously set her preferences with her home automation agent that is accessible on the Web from her phone, tablet, TV or laptop.

How does this translate to a technical Description

The physical user controls on the washing machine are deliberately simple, and designed to work in conjunction with the web based home automation agent. This agent has access to Joan’s electricity supplier and as is able to track the price charged by her supplier on her electricity plan as it changes according to demand across the city. The agent runs in the cloud, but is able to communicate through the firewall with devices in Joan’s home via her home hub. This was set up automatically when she first plugged the machine in. The washing machine has a very limited embedded controller. It suffices to run the desired washing and drying cycle, and has sensors that monitor its operation and enable components that are wearing out to be detected before they fail. Joan has agreed to share this data with the manufacturer as part of the warranty agreement. In return, she gets proactive scheduling of service visits at her convenience.

What application domains are related (e.g. referring to the taxonomy)

main: smart home / home automation / deferred operation
related: smart cities / smart grid / signaling with smart power devices

What interaction pattern with or btw things can be observed

Thing registers: thing registers with service in the cloud
Configure data subscription: specific data field (e.g. for maintenance) is forwarded (e.g. to manufacturer)
Thing integration in web based agent

Which aspects are not considered

Life cycle of devices, services and applications
Discovery of devices
Installation process
Dealing with faults
Replacing devices
Taking devices out of operation

Use Case Contributions

Use case contributions

Use Cases and Applications

Smart homes and buildings

Smart Homes is a term covering a range of application areas including home automation, home security, home entertainment and wearables. Some of these use cases also apply to offices and other buildings.

Home automation

This relates to applications for:

Environmental control
- Heating, ventilation, air conditioning, sun screens
Deferred operation of power hungry devices
Electrical charging for vehicles
Solar panels for electrical power and hot water
Ambient lighting control (e.g. Philips Hue)
Smart lighting for aquaria
Home cooking
Garage doors
Smart watering systems indoors and outdoors
Baby monitors
Timed pet food dispensers
Monitoring perishable goods, e.g. in a refrigerator
Remote monitoring, e.g. of washer cycle status
Monitoring and proactive maintenance scheduling
Event triggered task execution

Home entertainment

‘’’to be considered’’’

Home security

Door locks
Sensors for open doors and windows
Pressure, motion and Infrared sensors
Security cameras
Notifications, e.g. to the owners or to the police
Sports and lifestyle
Fitness related use cases

Smart lifecare

Sports and lifestyle

This includes wrist bands and smart watches that monitor the number of steps you take and your performance when running, etc.

Fitness related use cases

Healthcare and medical

This covers the role of devices for monitoring your health and helping you to track your use of medications, as a basis for improving outcomes, and reducing the costs of healthcare. This is of importance to everyone now that we are all living longer!

Remote patient monitoring and care
Self monitoring and wellness

Assisted living for people with physical or cognitive impairments

This relates to devices, applications and services for people with disabilities of one kind or another, e.g. physical impairments in vision, hearing or dexterity, or cognitive impairments. This is increasingly important in societies where more and more people are surviving into an old age and need help to live life to the best extent possible.

Smart cities

Smart grids

Smart meter reading
Street lighting automation
Signalling with smart power devices
Advanced transmission and distribution
Monitoring of water levels for hydropower

This includes:

Consumer devices that adapt to the supply and demand of electricity on the public grid
- Deferring the start of a wash cycle until power is cheaper
- Deferring the full charge of an electric car until power is cheaper
- Electric based storage heaters
Devices that generate electricity, e.g. solar panels and wind turbines
Smart meters that would enable variable tariffs according to the current load on the grid

Some questions:

How does the grid signal the current load so that devices can dynamically adapt to the conditions?
Where to place the control? In the device that consumes or generates power, or elsewhere, e.g. a home hub or a cloud based service.
Are there opportunities for consumers to switch between suppliers dynamically according to spot prices that are set according to supply and demand?

Other utilities

Monitoring water levels for flood warnings
Weather monitoring stations

Satellite based remote monitoring, e.g. aridity of farm land and forest fires

Transportation

Aviation
Monitoring and forecasting
- Traffic slow downs
- Timetables and current status
- Navigation and route planning
Vehicle diagnostic and maintenance reports
Remote maintenance services
Traffic accident information collection
Fleet management using digital tachographs
Smart parking
Car/bicycle sharing services

How to get the best out of different modes of transport:

This includes:

Traffic congestion
Availability of parking places
Local, regional and long distance trains
Metro
Buses
Taxis
Bicycles
Pedestrians

It also includes opportunities for the use of web technologies in vehicles (smart cars). This includes ideas such as allowing cars to sense and report road conditions, e.g. flooding, fog, ice and potholes.

Emergencies and civil disturbances

The Web of Things offers opportunities for faster reporting of accidents and for managing traffic lights and route planning for emergency vehicles. Cameras in the street, or within buildings of vehicles can make it easier to track civil disturbances, whether an individual act of violence or a demonstration that looks like getting out of control. For earthquakes and other disasters, there are opportunities for resilient communication and control systems.

Fire, medical and police vehicles
Information delivery in devastated areas
Robust communication and control
Monitoring and management of demonstrations and riots

Retail

Opportunities for offering customers personalised deals, better analytics through tracking people as they move around with stores, location based services and more. The emergence of technologies to sense what items are in your shopping cart or basket for a streamlined check out process. Simplified inventory tracking.

Inventory management
Perishable goods
Anti-theft devices
What do people spend their time looking at whilst shopping?
How do people move around the store?
Pushing location and context dependent offers
Point of sales terminals

Logistics

Opportunities for improved tracking of warehouses, items and shipments through tags on individual items, pallets and containers. This can range from optically scanned bar codes, to RFID tags, and smart tags that can track the location, temperature and humidity. Tagged objects can be associated with data held in the cloud. For example, where a given food item was produced and packaged, and the conditions it has experienced during its shipment, as well as its target destination. Knowing where items, pallets and containers are currently located and where it is needed makes it easier to plan shipments and optimal ways to move items about a warehouse.

Location and environmental sensors
Metadata relating to shipments
Logistical planning support
Inventory management

Smart manufacturing

Design of bespoke products
Monitoring of system operation
Robots, 3D printing and other technologies
Bringing new workstations online
Inventory management and logistics

The Web of Things brings opportunities for reducing the time from the start of design to shipping new products. It will also make it much easier to support bespoke products tailored to the specific requirements of each customer. Putting these together heralds a major shift in how products are managed. The Web of Things will also make it practical to optimise maintenance through accurate measurement of how individual manufacturing tools behave under use. It should be much quicker to introduce new manufacturing tools into a production chain, and to move work items from one station to another. The Web of Things will help with improvements to logistics and inventory control. Better information on how products are used in practice will be fed into improvements in the design of the next generation of products.

Construction and building automation

The Web of Things has opportunities both during construction and during the lifetime of buildings. During construction sensors can provide detailed information as to the conditions within the building site, as well as for the logistics involved in large projects. During the lifetime of a building, sensors can detect stresses in the fabric of the building, and help with emergencies by sensing fire and smoke, as well as the presence of people and guiding them to safety. Lighting, heating, ventilation and air conditioning systems can be optimised based upon sensing the conditions throughout the building and comparing this to which rooms are currently occupied.

Use cases relating to construction sites
Use cases relating to operation of large buildings

What’s missing?