Eng Wah Lee

Business process management (BPM) standards: a survey

Purpose – In the last two decades, a proliferation of business process management (BPM) modeling languages, standards and software systems has given rise to much confusion and obstacles to adoption. Since new BPM languages and notation terminologies were not well defined, duplicate features are common. This paper seeks to make sense of the myriad BPM standards, organising them in a classification framework, and to identify key industry trends.Design/methodology/approach – An extensive literature review is conducted and relevant BPM notations, languages and standards are referenced against the proposed BPM Standards Classification Framework, which lists each standards distinct features, strengths and weaknesses.Findings – The paper is unaware of any classification of BPM languages. An attempt is made to classify BPM languages, standards and notations into four main groups: execution, interchange, graphical, and diagnosis standards. At the present time, there is a lack of established diagnosis standards. I...

Web Services Implementation Methodology for SOA Application

With the popularity of Web services technology and the increase trend of developing service-oriented architecture (SOA) software, there is a need for an implementation methodology for Web services. This paper addresses the SOA application development challenges, identifies gaps in agile software methodology for Web services development, and observes Web services characteristics and its best practices. The contribution of this paper is to extend any existing agile software methodology to include Web services best practices into the agile software methodology.

A solution for integrated track and trace in supply chain based on RFID & GPS

The RFID and positioning system technologies are the key enablers for logistics supply chain visibility and tracking. While RFID is useful for inventory and material handling processes in warehouses, as soon as the RFID-tagged goods leave the warehouses, one often lose track of them until the next loading docks. In-between the sending and receiving points, there is often no tracking of the cargo which may be at risk of missing, off-loading and delay especially if the cargo is critical or perishable. The positioning system such as GPS (Global Positioning System) is usually used to track the vehicle; however it only provides a geographical location without associating business process info. The present research targets at a total solution architecture for seamless, global wide, track and trace system for logistics supply chain using an integrated RFID and positioning system technologies. The research involves development of a new solution for track and trace using both RFID and GPS, integrated information management models and web-based services. It can integrate RFID events with geographical location information and associate them with the cargo, so that the cargo can be seamlessly tracked and traced.

A robust two-phase heuristic algorithm for the truck scheduling problem in a resource-constrained crossdock

This paper studies truck scheduling in a resource-constrained crossdock. The problem decides on the sequence of incoming and outgoing trucks at the dock doors of the crossdocking terminal, subject to the availability of crossdock resources including dock doors and material handling systems. The resources are assumed non-preemptive making it necessary to address the feasibility of the problem before its optimality as it might be entrapped in deadlock and no feasible solution is produced. The paper thus aims at developing an algorithmic approach capable of establishing solution feasibility for truck scheduling problem instances of various types and difficulty levels which at the same time can be readily implemented in an industrial setting. The proposed approach is a two-phase heuristic algorithm where in the first phase, a heuristic search is deployed to construct a feasible sequence of trucks for the assignment to dock doors and in the second, a rule-based heuristic is used to assign each sequenced truck to a proper dock door, subject to a limited number of forklifts, such that significant savings in the truck schedule length are achieved. Extensive experiments are conducted to evaluate the efficiency of the algorithm in terms of deadlock avoidance and solution quality. The evaluation is carried out against the solutions generated by the exact mathematical model of the problem and a constructive heuristic developed for a similar truck scheduling problem. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm is robust in avoiding deadlock and generates feasible solutions for the instances where the other two approaches cannot. Furthermore, significant improvement in the solution quality is achieved by augmenting the algorithm to a re-starting heuristic.

Issues and Approaches to Dynamic, Service-oriented Multi-enterprise Collaboration

Businesses today form dynamic business alliances to meet short-term business goals. However, in traditional business-to-business integration (B2Bi), the connections are typically long term and static. This paper discusses the potential of service-oriented architecture (SOA) and Web services in overcoming the issues and challenges of dynamic business partnerships. Some outstanding issues and challenges include the formulation of business processes for B2Bi at different levels of granularity and the dynamic composition, matching, selection and invocation of relevant services.

A secure RFID-based track and trace solution in supply chains

Supply chain traceability and visibility are key concerns for many companies. RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) is an enabling technology that allows identification of objects in a fully automated manner via radio waves. The EPCglobal Network is promoting a standardised way for using RFID technology through the use of inexpensive RFID tags and readers, The EPCglobal standard leverages on the pervasive Internet for effective information sharing of tracked items. This paper presents a research effort undertaken to design and develop a secure RFID-based track and trace solution in supply chains, by leveraging on the EPCglobal standard. When a product bearing a RFID tag goes through an EPCglobal-enabled supply chain, all the RFID events are captured and stored on EPCIS servers, which can be shared among other participants in the supply chain in a secured and controlled manner. To address security issues, two levels of security are investigated. One is at lower level, between reader and tag. The other is at higher business level, to control information sharing among participants of a supply chain based on a COT (Circle of Trust) concept. A prototype system is developed and discussed at the end of the paper to demonstrate its viability.

Dynamic Collaborative Business Process Formulation via Ontologised Hierarchical Task Network (HTN) Planning

Increased trade and globalization has created an increasing need for the dynamic formulation and integration of cross-enterprise collaborative business processes (cBP’s). However, current systems and methodologies, being static in nature, are unable to dynamically formulate cBP’s based on business goals and selection criteria. Much of this stems from the current inability to bridge high level strategic business goals to low-level operational tasks, and the inability to dynamically decompose compound business process tasks into primitive operational tasks for direct Web service execution.In this paper, we demonstrate how the concepts from hierarchical task network (HTN) planning are feasible for dynamically creating cBP task sequences ideal for direct Web service execution. We also establish the rationale behind modeling business-to-business (B2B) collaboration tasks as hierarchical Web ontologies. To demonstrate the achievability of dynamic cBP formulation, we developed the Genesis methodology, which consists of (1) Business-OWL (BOWL) - a B2B hierarchical task Web ontology, and (2) the Genesis algorithm – an extension of the hierarchical task network (HTN) planning algorithm to handle business criteria and control flows commonly found in business processes.

Address supply chain visibility from knowledge management perspective

Supply chain visibility is an important issue for both academic research and industrial practice. This paper presents a new insight to supply chain visibility for better collaborative decision making from knowledge management perspective. It presents a framework for managing knowledge required for collaborative decisions in supply chain processes. The framework tackles two kinds of knowledge: quantitative knowledge and qualitative knowledge. Quantitative knowledge is discovered from a supply chainpsilas business databases through data mining, and qualitative knowledge like experience and judgment captured from human in the collaborative decision making process. The infusion of quantitative and qualitative knowledge provides better understanding of supply chain processes and the decision contexts for decision makers to make decisions quickly under the pressures of time- and knowledge-based competition. The knowledge is then codified into supply chainpsilas knowledge repository. A knowledge mapping mechanism is also provided in the framework to present visibility to all partners in a supply chain by accessing knowledge from knowledge repository efficiently and effectively at anytime and anywhere.

High-level Business Processes for Agile B2B Collaboration

Increasingly, more businesses are collaborating to leverage on the competencies of potential partners in furtherance of common goals. Although best sourcing is the mantra of the day, many businesses are finding it more efficacious to form business alliances supported by IT-enabled business processes.

A business process management approach for RFID enabled supply chain management

Integrating RFID data into an enterprise application has been a challenge to RFID adoption, especially for small to medium enterprises. So far RFID middleware has been used to bridge RFID readers and enterprise applications. As middleware and enterprise application are usually deployed using different platform, it proved to be complicated and costly to realize real-time integration. This paper proposes an event-driven business process management approach that unifies RFID event processing and business event processing. The approach exploits event driven architecture to efficiently manage the event data, and also to provide one single extensible platform for enterprises to extend that functional capability. It fully complies with service oriented architecture by leveraging the loose-coupling and vertical integration capability.