Summary of topocare experience at the Hannover Messe

Presentation of the PoC on the Hannover Fair (H16, A04)

The “pay per use” or “pay on production” PoC realizes a machine payment for every production step undertaken. The IOTA tokens are transferred directly as soon as a production step is finalized.

In the PoC the textile consumption is monitored by the machine, which triggers the payment. The machine is operating its own IOTA wallet and initiating the transaction of IOTA token based on the monitoring. The amount transferred for each production step is 3 IOTA which represents a micro-transaction of a approximately 0,0000009 Euro.

Due to the fact that a transaction has to be confirmed within the IOTA tangle it needs some time to be accepted. The machine is monitoring the transaction process and is promoting or reattaching a transaction, if it was not confirmed within a certain time. The average confirmation time was 3–5 minutes.

All transactions undertaken on the Hannover fair can be seen on thetangle.org. It can be observed, that there were periods were the transactions had to be reattached quite often. Also, we were facing problems with the Wifi on the fair. However, in general the payment process went well.

Overview of the transactions done with the machine

With each transaction undertaken the machine is also attaching the current production status to the tangle. The message field of a transaction is used to insert the production parameter. This are the machine name, timestamp, rotary encoder status and the GPS-position of the machine (we had to turn off the GPS data transfer on the fair, because there was a bad connectivity within the hall).

Use of the message field to combine payment and production data in one transaction

The attachment of machine data to the tangle, coupled with the transaction of IOTA tokens, guarantees an independent and trusted record of the production process. Thus the machine owner and machine operator have an independent base to check, whether the use of the machine was within the agreed terms.

Machine payments and production data can be visualized e.g. on website. We created an example in our last report.

The overall feedback of visitors on the fair was quite positive. Lots of ideas and contacts were exchanged. We look forward to further developing the idea of IOTA and contributing our knowledge to future projects.