Ali Dada

Sensor applications in the supply chain: the example of quality-based issuing of perishables

Miniaturization and price decline are increasingly allowing for the use of RFID tags and sensors in inter-organizational supply chain applications. This contribution aims at investigating the potential of sensor-based issuing policies on product quality in the perishables supply chain. We develop a simple simulation model that allows us to study the quality of perishable goods at a retailer under different issuing policies at the distributor. Our results show that policies that rely on automatically collected expiry dates and product quality bear the potential to improve the quality of items in stores with regard to mean quality and standard deviation.

Implementation of the Arabic Numerals and their Syntax in GF

The numeral system of Arabic is rich in its morphosyntactic variety yet suffers from the lack of a good computational resource that describes it in a reusable way. This implies that applications that require the use of rules of the Arabic numeral system have to either reimplement them each time, which implies wasted resources, or use simplified, imprecise rules that result in low quality applications. A solution has been devised with Grammatical Framework (GF) to use language constructs and grammars as libraries that can be written once and reused in various applications. In this paper, we describe our implementation of the Arabic numeral system, as an example of a bigger implementation of a grammar library for Arabic. We show that users can reuse our system by accessing a simple language-independent API rule.

Demonstrating the Application of Digital Product Memories in a Carbon Footprint Scenario

The carbon footprint is an environment indicator, which is of special interest not only for assessing and optimizing production and logistic processes, but also for addressing a growing interest of customers in the ecologic characteristics of a product. Its computation and processing are tightly bound to research challenges, such as the capturing and exploration of item-level data, and the aggregation of item-level process instances. In this article, we report about a demonstration system, which aims at illustrating visitors of a technology fair how these challenges can be addressed by means of item-level records created from input obtained via smart labels. In a scenario spanning several steps of a products lifecycle, the system enables the creation and exploitation of these records. During each stage, the system combines item-level data with more general information related, e.g., to the product class and the underlying process model - with the ultimate goal not only to support the assessment of an item’s carbon footprint, but also its reduction for future products of the same class.

The Potential of a Network-Centric Solution for Sustainability in Business Processes

Due to an increasing pressure from international regulation, customers and other stakeholders, companies are increasingly experiencing the need to incorporate sustainability considerations in their core business processes and daily operations. For this purpose they require software solutions that simplify the collection, analysis, and incorporation of sustainability indicators at the right processes across their operations. However, prevailing systems are enterprise-centric in the sense that they are owned and used by one focal company collecting the data from different sources and using it for its internal decision making. This paper will describe three example use cases in which sustainability plays a key role and will provide an overview of major problems with the current state of the art. In the second part of the paper, a new approach for sharing sustainability indicators is introduced that enables many providers and consumers of environmental data to connect to and leverage a common platform. Finally, the paper analyzes the potential risks and benefits of introducing such a network platform, using the three business use cases to illustrate the opportunities resulting from it.