SOcial LOcal MObile iNdoor shopping experience

by

E-commerce has drastically transformed the retail industry. In SOLOMON the main target is to improve the customer experience in bricks-and-mortar stores. SOLOMON’s innovation is to define a “shop operations & experience” platform connecting different technologies and information sources into seamless services for interaction with the retailers, shop personnel, and consumers. Platform requirements are set by retail stores and technology providers who define the use cases that are demonstrated and evaluated during the project in bricks-and-mortar stores.

PROJECT TITLE – SOcial LOcal MObile iNdoor shopping experience

ACRONYM- SOLOMON

Project’s identification number: 14025

Contract: 67/2018

Project partners:

Deposit code: PN-III-P3-3.5-EUK-2017-02-0075

Contract number:  67 din 01/07/2018

The total value of the budget: 1.651.500,00 Lei

The total value of the contract: 2.418.900,00  Lei

The total value of the co-founding: 767.400,00 Lei

The start date of the contract: 01/07/2018

The end date of the contract: 31/12/2020 [31/12/2023 End date of the project]

Contract duration –  30 months

Project duration – 66 months

Coordinator: BEIA Consult International SRL

Project Director (coordinator): Dr. Ing. George Suciu (george [at] beia [dot] ro, Peroni 16, Bucharest, Romania, Tel: +40374104901, Fax: +40213323006)

Project leader: Martin Johannes Treiber [IKANGAI GmbH]

Project financed by UEFISCDI through the European and International Cooperation Program

[ Project Leaflet ]

More information on ITEA3_SOLOMON and European project website

Phase I – Market analysis, SoTA, and use cases definition 

Activity 1.1 Elaboration of the market study and business plan

Activity 1.2 Analysis of the Current State Of The Art

Activity 1.3 Analysis of the stores’ infrastructure and services

Activity 1.4 Use cases definition

Activity 1.5 Analysis of data acquisition regarding the products and customers

Phase description

Phase I of the project started on 15.06.2018 and ended on 31.12.2018 and provided one market study/business plan and four research reports, and also the first dissemination report.

Results

The main results achieved in Phase I of the project are:

    • Activity I.1 carried out the analysis of the commerce market and the elaboration of the business plan.
    • The objective of Activity I.2 was to analyze the current state of the art regarding technologies implemented within the nowadays smart shopping solutions.
    • Activity I.3 delivered an analysis of the retail stores’ infrastructure, concentrating on the national shops’ network, and also have been identified the products specifications and services offered to the customers.
    • Activity I.4 established the use-cases associated with the SOLOMON system.
  • Activity I.5 analyzed the means of data acquisition regarding products and customers, by documenting the technologies underlying the SOLOMON system.
  • The results achieved within phase I have been disseminated in the following events: participation at CSE 2018 conference.

Phase II – System Design

Activity 2.1 Defining the System Architecture

Activity 2.2 Designing the interfaces for augmented experiences

Activity 2.3 Designing the search engine

Phase description

Phase II of the project started on 01.01.2019 and ended on 30.06.2019, and provided three technical reports and the second dissemination report.

Results

The main results achieved in Phase II of the project are:

  • The Phase II results consisted of three research reports and one dissemination report. In this stage was established the system design through the advancement of the reference architecture. Activity II.2 presented the design of the interfaces for augmented experiences (SOLOMON mobile application, the interface with radio beacons, interfaces for data acquisition from smart devices). Activity II.3 presented the methodology for implementing the product recommendations system for users having in mind the project objective, namely to advance an intelligent and adaptable system that will produce observable results in terms of continuous assimilation of customer requirements.
  • The results achieved within phase II have been disseminated in the following events: participation at ELSE 2019 conference, and participation at URBAN INCERC conference.

Phase III – Developing the pilot system 

Activity 3.1 Developing the interfaces for augmented experiences

Activity 3.2 Developing the search engine

Activity 3.3 Integration the system components

Phase description

Phase III of the Solomon project started on 01.07.2018 and ended on 31.12.2019, and provided the technical documentation of the solution development.

Results

The main results achieved in Phase III of the project are:

  • SOLOMON mobile application (addressing customers)
  • Solomon WEB platform design and BETA version
  • IoT devices that once integrated into the pilot system provide services and functions based on augmented reality

The results achieved within phase III have been disseminated in the following events: participation in Innovative Enterprise Week, participation in Digital Assembly 2019, participation in Entertainment Arena Expo, participation in GoTech World, participation in Smart City Expo World Congress.

Phase IV – Defining the test scenarios, testing and calibrating the pilot system

Activity 4.1 Defining the test scenarios

Activity 4.2 Testing and calibrating the system

Phase description

Phase IV of the project started on 01.1.2020 and ended on 30.06.2020, and provided the SOLOMON system components test results.

Results

The main results achieved in Phase IV of the project are:

At this stage of the project, the acceptance tests of the system were reported, the SOLOMON system validation was performed by defining and running the test cases noted in the technical documentation.

Platform testing was defined as follows:
– testing of individual components;
– testing the components of the platform and its important subsystems;
– testing the platform as an independent entity;
– performance testing.

The results achieved within phase IV have been disseminated in the following events: participation in Knowledge4Innovation Forum, participation in CCW Event, participation in HorizonEU – The most ambitious EU framework program for research and innovation 2020.

Phase V – Validation of the pilot system, dissemination, and exploitation of the results 

Activity 5.1 System validation

Activity 5.2 Project’s results dissemination

Activity 5.3 Elaboration of the exploitation plan

Activity 5.4 Patent

Phase V of the project started on 01.07.2020 and will end on 31.12.2020, and will provide the following results:   the validation and dissemination reports.

Results

The main results achieved in Phase V of the project are:

o The intelligent service for orchestrating product promotion campaigns by managing the promotion offers in the WEB application and presenting the offers in the mobile application through proximity marketing.
o Intelligent parking management service. This service presents to users the availability of parking spaces and various statistics with their occupancy rate in the form of visual tools, both in the WEB application and in the mobile application.
o Indoor location service with prevention function based on thermographic maps.

The services described above, resulting from the project, are also presented in the form of videos available on the project’s YouTube channel, as follows:

– The presentation of the intelligent parking management service is available at this link https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y2DLM7rLMXQ&feature=youtu.be
– The presentation of the intelligent service for orchestrating promotional campaigns for merchants and the indoor location service is available at this link https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YUS8HWs0kfI&feature=youtu.be

The results achieved within phase IV have been disseminated in the following events: HANNOVER MESSE 2020, Turning Organisations Into Smart Organisations, Cities of Tomorrow #8, European Research & Innovation Days, Smart Choices for Smart Cities Conference, WEBSTOCK2020, GoTech World 2020, ZF Digital Summit 2020, SGEM2020.

Phase VI – Reporting of the economic effect

Phase VI of the project will start on 01.01.2021 and will end on 31.12.2021.

Phase VII – Reporting of economic effects

Phase VII of the project will start on 01.01.2022 and will end on 31.12.2022.

Phase VIII – Reporting of economic effects

Phase VIII of the project will start on 01.01.2023 and will end on 31.12.2023.

Social Media

Check the Twitter account here.

Publications:

  • Vochin M, Vulpe A, Boicescu L, Georgica Obreja S, Suciu G. An Intelligent Low-Power Displaying System with Integrated Emergency Alerting Capability. Sensors (Basel). 2019;19(3):666. Published 2019 Feb 6. doi:10.3390/s19030666.
  • Suciu G, Bucur G, Conu R. (2019). The importance of Social Media in Smart Cities. In The 15th edition of the research conference on constructions, the economy of buildings, architecture, urban and territorial development 2019.
  • Marcu, I. M., Ţigănuş, A., Drăgulinescu, A. M., & Suciu Jr, G. (2019, September). A new approach on Smart-Parking concept. In Proceedings of the 6th Conference on the Engineering of Computer Based Systems (p. 15). ACM.
  • Dragulinescu, A. M., Dragulinescu, A., Zamfirescu, C., Halunga, S., & Suciu, G. (2019, November). Smart Neighbourhood: LoRa-based environmental monitoring and emergency management collaborative IoT platform. In 2019 22nd International Symposium on Wireless Personal Multimedia Communications (WPMC) (pp. 1-6). IEEE.
  • „SMART SHOPPING PLATFORM BASED ON DIGITAL MAP GENERATION AND INDOOR LOCALIZATION SERVICES FOR EDUCATION OF CUSTOMERS”. In ELSE2020 Conference.
  • “Smart Shopping Solution”. In Student scientific communication session 2020.

Project Meetings

  • SOLOMON Project 1st Review, January 30th 2019
  • SoMeDi & SOLOMON Joint Meeting, April 4th, Madrid

Acknowledgement

This work was supported by a grant of the Romanian Ministry of Research and Innovation, CCCDI-UEFISCDI, project number PN-III-P3-3.5-EUK-2017-02-0075.