# Research Challenges for the Internet of Things: What Role Can OR Play?
## 3 How can OR Support the Future IoT?
### Industry Investment in IoT--An Application of the Multimethodology Approach  
OR support for decisions on industry investment in IoT has been discussed in Section 4.3 in terms of the OR mathematical technique of Game Theory. A case study of the problem of investing in the IoT has also been reported using the OR techniques of agent-based modelling and Data Analytics [71]. Several Systems Thinking approaches can also be applied to this problem situation/research challenge. Thus it is an IoT problem/research challenge which might be best addressed by the Multimethodology approach. In fact, all the IoT research challenges listed in Table 5 need to be tackled by more than one systems approach, i.e., using the Multimethodology approach. In this paper, we only discuss one systems approach for each research challenge to explain that particular approach, but a full systems study would probably use the Multimethodology approach. Some of the advantages and challenges of using the Multimethodology approach are listed in [PERSON] and [PERSON] [139]. Their study of e-government highlighted the need for better research methods for studying complex socio-technical systems, and the IoT must be one of the most complex systems of this type. Research into the Multimethodology approach has been scarce [140] and the OR/Systems Thinking community must address the need for better education and research in this approach in the future. The IoT has been described as a System of Systems (SoS) or ecosystem [141], which may be defined as:  
_\"A composition of systems in which its constituent systems are individually discovered, selected, and composed possibly at run-time to build a more complex system. The constituent systems are managed (at least in part) for their own purposes rather than the purposes of the whole and maintain a continuing operational existence independent of the collaborative system. The resulting composed system (the SoS) is more complex and offers more functionality and performance than simply the sum of its constituent systems.\"_  
Business investment in the IoT is going to be much more complex than investments in the products and services of an individual firm, and even more complex than currently existing investments in e-commerce over the Internet. New business models for the IoT which view it as a \"business ecosystem\" will need to be developed. This is _\"a complex adaptive system (whose) population develops through co-evolution with the greater environment, self-organization and emergence (i.e., the ability and process to create new order), and adaptation to the environment\"_ ([PERSON] [142] quoted in [PERSON] et al. [19]). This is shown in Figure 8 below. [PERSON] [143] provides a useful explanation of how the IoT can add business value to companies. The IoT differs from other information systems in providing high resolution data in real time. This reduces the cost of transferring data from the real world to the virtual world, e.g., RFID tags  
Figure 8: Generic actors in a business ecosystem (redrawn from [PERSON] et al. [18]). eliminate expensive manual stock taking and keying of data into PCs. [PERSON]'s analysis identified seven ways that the IoT adds business value, including proximity triggers, e.g., self checkout in libraries, automatic sensor triggers, e.g., networked smoke detectors, and automatic product security, e.g., anti-counterfeiting cryptography. It shows that the IoT represents a quantum leap forward from the Internet and has the potential to become a tool that advances the entire discipline of how to manage organizations and complex systems. Another Systems Thinking approach, System Dynamics (SD), has also been applied to industry investment in new technology, in particular the diffusion of the Internet in India and China [125]. In principle, industry investment in the IoT could be modeled in a similar way. As these authors discuss, SD can represent quantifiable as well as \"soft\" variables, which is useful since the diffusion context has both social and technical aspects.