An Approach for the Integration of Data Within Complex Logistics Systems

Abstract

Due to a global competition today’s business world changed dramatically whereas the ongoing trend towards global enterprise networks has lead to increasing customer expectations regarding the performance of logistics systems which have to be simultaneously reliable, robust and cost-effective. One the one hand reliability, robustness and cost-efficiency mainly depend on the availability of suitable ICTsolutions as well as their proper integration into the business processes. As a consequence various systems were developed in the past and are currently in use. On the other hand the seamless access to the data kept by all these different systems is a key issue in order to meet the requirements of logistics systems of today and tomorrow. In this context data integration represents a major challenge which is still unsolved. This paper describes a proposal for a service-oriented approach towards the seamless integration of logistics data which aims at combining existing systems and standards and thus overcoming today’s data and information barriers. By accepting existing standards and interfaces this requires innovative approaches addressing the semantic description of data, their transparent transformation between different representations as well as a common interface which can be provided to the various systems which are currently applied in the field of logistics.