# Research Challenges for the Internet of Things: What Role Can OR Play?
## 5 Conclusions  
This paper gives a brief overview of the Internet of Things (IoT), research challenges to its design, use and widespread adoption, and the important contemporary worldwide efforts to develop interoperability standards. The aim of the paper is to survey the application of Operations Research (OR) methods, including the OR sub-discipline of Systems Thinking, to the IoT. The methods were subdivided into \"hard\" OR tools and techniques, which mainly address the technical and business challenges of the IoT, and Systems Thinking approaches, which can address both technical, business and non-technical challenges, including social, legal and ethical challenges. The research for the paper included review of a very large number of journal articles, conference papers and industry reports on the IoT, the numbers of which are rapidly increasing as the IoT has become a popular area for academic research and business investment. Most of this work is theoretical and few case studies have been reported. Reports on the application of OR and Systems Thinking to the IoT have so far been relatively scarce, although their numbers can be expected to increase in future years. Nevertheless, we were surprised at the amount of work on OR applied to the IoT that is out there, so far mainly in conference papers. The OR journals have been slower to report this application area, although many papers on the adoption of new technology in general have appeared in recent years. Our review has shown that OR techniques are starting to be applied to some of the major research challenges of the IoT, particularly that of Data Management, where the OR sub-discipline of Data Analytics is developing new approaches to the analysis of \"big data\" and has become a field whose skills are much in demand by business. The challenge of developing business models for investing in the IoT is also seeing a significant amount of work done by OR practitioners in the field of Decision Analysis, including Game Theory, Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) and Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA). The more Information and Communications Technology (ICT)-oriented challenges of the IoT such as network architecture have not attracted as much OR attention as yet, although the OR techniques of Routing and Graph Theory have much potential for contributing to the solution of such problems. Few case studies which attempt to evaluate the efficiency and effectiveness of the IoT have been reported, partly due to its complexity and partly due to the lack of real-world data with which to evaluate such performance measures as return-on-investment ([PERSON] et al. [71]). In this paper we discuss some selected research challenges and applicable OR methods in greater depth--the breadth of topics in the paper precluded doing so for all research challenges and OR methods. Of the \"hard\" OR methods the topics selected were: the application of Simulation to the challenge of Scalability, the application of Reliability Theory to the challenge of Robustness and the application of Game Theory to the challenge of industry investment in the IoT. Of the Systems Thinking methods the topics selected were General Systems and Complexity theory, Self-organizing Systems theory, the application of Soft Systems Methodology (SSM) to Intelligence and Context Awareness, the application of System Dynamics (SD) to Internet/IoT Diffusion and Software Engineering, the application of SSM to Technology Transfer and the application of Multimethodology to industry investment in the IoT. Systems Thinking approaches such as General Systems Theory (GST) and Complexity Theory are, we believe, of great importance for improving (not \"solving\") some of the technical and non-technical problems of the IoT, and an increasing amount of work is being done by the systems thinking community, as published in such new journals as _International Journal of Information Technologies and Systems Approach_, and _Systems_.