Event-driven services: Integrating production, logistics and transportation

Abstract

Today's production processes are characterized by global supply chains, short lifecycles, and an increasing personalization of goods. To satisfy the demands for agility we must integrate the production with the logistics processes and knowledge about the underlying transportation services and infrastructure. This requires continuous monitoring and reacting to events. Service-oriented architectures have provided a platform for structuring services within and across enterprises. However, for an effective monitoring and timely reaction to emerging situations it is crucial to integrate event processing and service orientation. In this position paper we show how event processing and service orientation can be combined into an effective delivery platform for an integrated coordination of the flow of goods. We show how simple events, e.g. RFID tag detections or simple sensor readings, can be integrated into abstract events that are meaningful to invoke logistics services and improve the celerity of responses. We propose filtering, aggregating, and on-the-fly analysis of the continuous flow of events and make events persistent in an event warehouse for auditability and input to future planning processes. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.