The M2X Economy – Concepts for Business Interactions, Transactions and Collaborations Among Autonomous Smart Devices

Abstract

Nowadays, business transactions almost exclusively focus on human-to-human transactions. The persistent growth and expansion of the Internet of Things, the ubiquitousness of so called smart devices, as well as progressing digitalization of our daily life, enables business transactions without human intervention among autonomously acting machine agents; a concept referred to as the Machine-to-Machine (M2M) economy. Besides M2M interactions, machines interact with humans (Machine-to-Human -- M2H), or infrastructure components (Machine-to-Infrastructure -- M2I). The term Machine-to-Everything (M2X) economy represents a more general view on use cases that involve autonomous smart devices and also encompasses M2M, M2H and M2I scenarios. While the technical concepts of IoT, Smart Homes, Smart Cities and Industry 4.0 that enable the M2X economy have been around for a while now, a widespread adoption as well as applications that use their full potential are still missing. Many isolated applications exist that aim to solve very specific and simplified use cases that fall within the spectrum of the M2X economy. However, an interoperable, integrated, scalable model that facilitates the M2X economy is non-existing. Likewise, concepts for a M2X value transfer and collaborations among machines to achieve shared objectives within this ecosystem are missing as well. This work focuses on the emerging M2X ecosystem in the context of Information System research and makes three contributions: First, it suggests architectural concepts that encompass a blockchain-based interaction-, transaction- and collaboration model for M2X use cases, a business collaboration lifecycle and governance structure as well as a set of modalities for these use cases derived through an exploratory research approach. Second, it presents a decentralized self-sovereign identity solution in combination with a validation and authentication mechanism that is suitable for the M2X ecosystem. Sybil attacks are a common issue of decentralized networks. Thus we present a mechanism to price the costs of a sybil node attack, thereby providing an easy to use metric for the sybil resistance of a decentralized M2X system. As a step towards a formal validation of these novel infrastructural concepts, a Colored Petri Net model is provided covering the protocol-driven data exchange of the M2X identity solution. The developed identity protocols are validated using CPN models and proof-of-concept implementations, while specific aspects of the presented M2X identity solution are evaluated using historical data to asses its suitability. Finally, the feasibility of the M2X interactions-, transactions- and collaboration model as well as the identity solution is demonstrated