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
Marco Comuzzi3
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
Marco Comuzzi4
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
Marco Comuzzi5
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
Marco Comuzzi6
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
Marco Comuzzi8
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,…
Marco Comuzzi9
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
Marco Comuzzi10
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
Marco Comuzzi11
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
Marco Comuzzi12
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
Marco Comuzzi13
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)
Marco Comuzzi14
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!
Questions?
Back