Visual enhancement of service maps in logistics clouds

Abstract

Logistics and its involved parties are nowadays faced with demanding challenges, in order to fulfill their customers' needs. Hence logistics service providers are constrained to cooperate with each other, which leads to the challenge of 'understanding' each other's service descriptions and integrating the strongly differing IT-systems. An emerging approach to solve this problem is the operation of cloud platforms. Main tasks are service retrieval and composition. However, a suitable visualization is needed to generate a high user acceptance. With the service map concept a first step is taken, that certainly needs further improvement. This paper briefly gives an introduction to general information visualization and analyzes the suitability of several approaches for improving the service map concept with regards to different scales of measurement. After their comparison a general guideline for fostering the visualization concept is derived. Objective is the increase of information content while keeping an intuitive usability.