A collaborative model for logistics process management

Collaborative networks that connect customers and suppliers are creating value by making trading more efficient and possibly even more effective than traditional method. The term collaborative network (CN) was used in (Camarinha-Matos, and Afsarmanesh, 2004) to refer to the complex systems emerging in many forms in different application domains, and consisting of many facets whose proper xmderstanding requires the contribution from multiple disciplines. Companies focus on their core business and outsomce secondary activities to other organizations. The coordination of processes by the customer's organization is difficult because part of the work is executed outside the company's boimdaries. Indeed, the outsourced service can be considered as a sub-part of a process initiated in the customer's organization. Thus, the whole process spans the customer and the suppher of the service and could be considered as an inter-organizational workflow that should be defined and managed in order to ensure that it produces the desired level of quality (Strieker et al, 2000). The traditional workflow approach to business process management involves describing the entire process from a centralised perspective (Jennings et al, 2000). In order to co-ordinate the relationships among supply chain actors it is important to have integrating techniques at tactical level used in conjunction with integration tools at operation level (Perona and Saccani, 2004). Supply Chain components can provide intelligence and flexibility to supply chain architectures. In (Verwijmeren, 2004) a software component architecture to provide intelhgence and flexibility to supply chains is proposed. Supply chain engines are built on top of ERP, WMS and TMS to provide a global inventory management engine. For implementation issues Java Enterprise, CORBA and web service technologies are used. (Mason et al, 2003) make use of a discrete event simulation model to examine the total cost benefits that can be achieved by suppliers and warehouses, through the increased global visibility provided by an integrated system. Global visibility can be considered as enabler for cost and service efficiency. Our approach considers a set of agents to perform activities associated with logistics management providing more flexibility than the traditional methods. The agents provide an open system with loosely coupled components and perform common tasks of a 3'^'' party logistics (3PL) operator such as storage, replenishment, order picking, packing, shipment, etc. Some tasks are outsourced to the collaborative partners (i.e shipping to transporters) or scheduled on basis of availability of manpower supplied by the collaborative partners. The advantages of employing agents include the facilitation of inter and intra organizational cooperation and flexibility in controlling process parameters. In some situations, it is not always possible to predict in advance all the parameters that may be important for the overall processes. This gives rise to the need of adaptive systems. (Piramuthu, 2005) presents a theoretical framework for dynamic formation and reconfiguration of supply chains. In this work we present a collaborative model for logistics management addressing the problem of the integration of activities of a 3PL operator. The goal of a 3PL operator is to achieve a balance between the warehouse and transportation costs and customer service level. In our model we define a collaborative network in which the 3PL operator interacts with manpower suppliers and transporters. The model supports cooperation between Warehouse Management System (WMS) and Transportation Management System (TMS) in order to fiind optimal combined logistics and distribution plans. The benefit of using this approach can be that be