Serving small businesses with “Internet of Things” technologies

摘要

Small businesses have played a major role in China''s remarkable economic growth in the past decades. With their expanding business territories, many small businesses need employ a small fleet of vehicles to transport goods that are sometime environment sensitive or even hazardous. With limited and often zero in-house IT (information technology) capability, they have dire needs for the state of the art IT services with minimum costs. Aiming to solve this problem, we developed a prototype system called “Blue Scene” that employs SaaS (Software-as-a-service) architecture and utilizes “Internet of Things” technologies including sensor network and RFID (Radio-frequency identification) technologies. Blue Scene system reports in real time not only the locations of vehicles, but also the specific environment parameters inside vehicles including temperature, pressure, and carbon monoxide. It also has capability to send out alerts when some observations violate the predefined business rules. In case of real emergency, Blue Scene system can assist decision makers to dynamically reschedule the route for vehicles or send out the rescue crew. Since Blue Scene system employs SaaS architecture, all its advanced capabilities is “rented” to small business as services and no high fixed upfront cost will occur to small businesses. Small businesses only need to pay according to the functions they used of the system. This paper describes the four-layer architecture of Blue Scene system in details and uses a case study to demonstrate the capability of Blue Scene system.