Jae An, 2017

1. Smart Home Inventory Management
Using Private Blockchain and Purchase
Order

2. Motivation
• Twenty-eight billion Internet of Things
devices are forecast by 2022.
• Current infrastructure – A cloud based
centralized database model has two
limitations
• Blockchain could be the solution

3. Objective
• Reduce dependence on intermediaries
• Distributed
– Single point of failure
– Bottlenecks

4. Public vs Private Blockchain
Public
- Bitcoin
- Privacy and security : Everyone
can access
- Difficult to scale : Proof-of-Work
- Distributed : Every participant is
equal
Private
- Eris
- Privacy and security : Only
stakeholders can access
- Easy to scale : Proof-of-Stake
- Decentralised

5. What is this?
• Inventory management system(Prototype)
• Home devices purchase items from
market automatically

6. Who will be using this?
• Homeowner
• Device
• Supplier
• Yet, potentially more stakeholders – Bank,
Deliverer, Government

7. How it works – Overview
1. Homeowner set up the environment
– Supplier verification
– Device registration
– Purchase order pre-set up
2. A device creates and broadcasts a
purchase order
3. Suppliers receive the purchase order
4. Transaction occurs with the lowest bidder

8. How it works
• 3 JavaScript applications – one per one
stakeholder
• 1 Eris-db (Private blockchain)

9. Demonstration

10. How it works – Purchase Order
• Can be started by Device.
• Contains Itemcode, max_price, quantity
• Can be closed when both device and
supplier agrees

11. How it works – Purchase Order
Manager
• Purchase Order Manager(PO manager) is
a smart contract
• Creates Purchase Order(PO) smart
contract
• Sets permissions to access PO and PO
manager

12. Result
• Reducing dependency?
– Direct transaction between device and
supplier
• How decentralized is it?
– Every participant keeps a copy of database

13. Future Work
• Disintermediation
– Financial transaction, Deliverer
• Privacy
• Big data
• Testing
• Deployable software

14. Achievement
• PO manager – a smart contract that
creates and manages smart contracts
• PO – Signed by multiple parties
• Inventory management use case – original
attempt using PO
• Research contribution