A Service-Based Infrastructure for Advanced Logistics

Luciano Baresi, Daniele Braga, Marco Comuzzi, Filippo Pacifici, and Pierluigi Plebani

ESEC-FSE 2nd Int. Workshop on Service-Oriented Software Engineering

Dubrovnik, September 3rd 2007

Marco Comuzzi2

Outline

Dangerous goods transportationThe scenario: constraints and issuesTechnological solutions: state of the art

Exploiting Web services in dangerous goods transportation

The proposed solutionsAbstraction of physical devicesService infrastructuresUsage scenarios

Concluding remarks and future work

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The scenario: dangerous goods transportation

Dangerous goods transportation: several constraints and requirements European Agreement Concerning the

International Carriage of Dangerous Goods by Road (ADR)

Standardize packaging and labels Construction, equipment, use of vehicles

Efforts for standardizing risk management practices and rescue activities

One basic issue European countries converging from the

normative point of view Very little has been done on integration from

the technological standpoint Intra-company solutions Industry solutions

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Technological support in dangerous goods transportation

Dangerous goods transportation as an instance of crisis management scenarios Medical emergencies Terrorist attacks ...

The role of technology Collecting updated information during routine operations

Tracking and tracing routes scheduling, traffic prediction,...

Support the organization of rescue activities after disruptive events

Risk management (recovery from accidents) Improve coordination among rescue agencies

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The Italian Scenario

EASyLog (E-Adaptive Services for Logistics): a national project Develop innovative technological support to dangeorus goods

transportation The scenario: inter-modal transportation: road, rail, parking areas

Containers might travel (rail) unsupervised or remain (parking areas) unsupervised for long time

Need for container-dependent technologies

The state of the art in dangerous goods transportation: highly heterogeneous

Tracking and tracing of transported goods made by individual companies Mobile phones, proprietary networking solutions

Tracking usually associated to trucks, not containers No coordination and interoperability among companies technological

platform Lack of support for risk management

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Dangerous goods transportation and Web services

Exploiting Web services Web services exploited at two levels

Intra-company (fleet management) Web Services implement the abstraction of physical devices (temperature, pressure,

position) placed on the container of dangerous goods (and not on the truck) Web services as resources that provide information on the status of the container

Inter-company Interoperable exchange of data among companies and risk management agency Web services for seamless integration of Enterprise Information Systems

Better coordination among companies Joint and efficient schedule of routes Provide updated information to customers

Better coordination with risk managers (private and public agencies, firemen, police,...) Centralized (inter-company) monitoring systems Timely detection of emergencies Easier collection of information about damanged containers and detection of

accidents Generally: easier to bring advanced solutions to Small and Medium Enterprises

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Device Abstraction: the generic approach

Three layered architecture for device abstraction Communication only between adjacent layers

Events to upper layer Synchrounous commands to lower layer

The application level views sensing devices as APIs

GPRS, UWB Tags, Sun Spot, Zigbee,…

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Device Abstraction in our approach

Application level API

Two networking protocols for sensing devices communication GPRS: for communication while travelling Ultra Wide Band (or Wi-Fi): in parking areas (hubs)

Other networking protocol can be accommodated when a suitable abstraction is implemented

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Service infrastructure: the implemented approach

Containers (devices) abstracted as a set of Web services Proprietary networking solutions to communicate with devices while travelling Risk manager WS interacts with the Company WS for gathering information on

containers The main issue: dependency on the proprietary application protocol for devices

The company must know the type of device Parking areas must adopt the same technology installed on the container

TRANSPORTATION COMPANY RISK MGMT AGENCYPARKING AREA

CONTAINER

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Service infrastructure: tracking information storage

Tracking and tracing Periodical (asynchronous) notification of the status (position,

temperature, pressure,...) by the container, stored in the company’s status DB

Data in the status DB can be read by the EIS (of different companies) E.g., routes scheduling, data exchange with other companies

Anomalous patterns can be detected and signalled to the Risk Management Agency

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Service infrastructure: risk management

Risk Management An accident is signaled to the Risk Management agency The risk manager asks for the position and status of containers

(synchronous communication) If the container is not reachable (severe damage) the most updated

information from the status DB is retrieved The Logical Container provides the logic for selecting the UWB or GPRS

networking protocol The collected information supports the organization of rescue actvities

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Service infrastructure: a look to the future (?)

Smart containers: the abstraction to WS is implemented directly on the device Communication with devices via HTTP, SOAP Full interoperability: no proprietary solutions, no need for the

registry of logical containers Main issue

Computational power and cost of devices to implement the abstraction (e.g., Sun Spot, J2mE programmable devices)

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Open issues and future work

Security issues concerning information exchange among heterogenous company (e.g., privacy of data)

Actual feasibility of the proposed approach w.r.t. current status of dangerous goods transportation industryTechnical issues (e.g., where to put antennas...)Costs

Future workConcluding the implementation of supporting toolsAdoption of WSDM to increase the use of standards

in the service infrastructure Integration with the ORCHESTRA platform for risk

management (Integrated platform for cross-context risk management)

Thanks!

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