1. A Service-Based Infrastructure for Advanced Logistics Luciano Baresi, Daniele Braga, Marco Comuzzi, Filippo Pacifici, and Pierluigi Plebani ESEC-FSE 2 nd Int. Workshop on Service-Oriented Software Engineering Dubrovnik, September 3 rd 2007

2. Marco Comuzzi 2 Outline  Dangerous goods transportation  The scenario: constraints and issues  Technological solutions: state of the art  Exploiting Web services in dangerous goods transportation  The proposed solutions  Abstraction of physical devices  Service infrastructures  Usage scenarios  Concluding remarks and future work

3. Marco Comuzzi 3 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

4. Marco Comuzzi 4 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

5. Marco Comuzzi 5 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

6. Marco Comuzzi 6 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

7. Marco Comuzzi 7 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

8. Marco Comuzzi 8 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,…

9. Marco Comuzzi 9 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

10. Marco Comuzzi 10 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 COMPANYRISK MGMT AGENCY PARKING AREA CONTAINER

11. Marco Comuzzi 11 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

12. Marco Comuzzi 12 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

13. Marco Comuzzi 13 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)

14. Marco Comuzzi 14 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 industry  Technical issues (e.g., where to put antennas...)  Costs  Future work  Concluding the implementation of supporting tools  Adoption 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)

15. Thanks! Questions? Back