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A New Book in Planning
Integrative Cyber Logistics
Platform, Services & Technology |
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| Y.V. Hui, Larry C. Leung, W. Cheung & S. Chu |
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| Book Highlights |
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Emerging industry practices encapsulate the landscape of the global logistics industry in shipment planning with demanding efficiency and effective collaboration. IT adoption is not so much a business decision but rather a corporate foundation to sustain competitive advantage. The industry community gathers online to begin a push towards cyber logistics. The Web transpires collaboration online with dynamic partners to conduct e-business, and itself becomes a platform where e-services flourish for community to harness unprecedented service quality and agility. Optimal logistics enabled by party e-services and theoretic models with effective decision-making process across collaborating partners. Cyber logistics continues to reach integrative nature as new innovative technology such as RFID and on-demand privacy and security standards take shape. The architectural consideration of a 4th party e-Platform is now highly congruent to the integrative cyber logistics with visibility, any-to-any collaboration and rich information space. In this book, in four parts, we provide a fundamental basis of thought process that now shapes the integrative future of logistics industry in cyber space.
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| The shifts in logistics practice were evident by the investment of different countries taken to target the improvement and expansion of airports. Air cargo logistics will become the core business of the industry and itself benefits most from e-Business technology. In this part, we will chart the landscapes of logistics industry and that of ITC, and how the intertwine of these two landscapes will play out in the near future, i.e., cyber logistics – an integrative era of the logistics industry. Cyber logistics is where the shipment planning with collaborating parties takes place as the physical world is aptly modelled and ‘viewed’ virtually online. As the shipment plan is being executed in the real world of time-space logistics, the control and monitor of the shipment continue online by the stakeholders and the service providers. This online logistics community soon expands into a powerful global cyber logistics industry, enabled by the advent of Web technology and participants, especially SME’s, are facilitated by cloud-based infrastructure (a plausible cyber infrastructure that was once envisioned). The 4th party electronic platform acts a conduit for agents to stay connected as the cloud absorbs the IT readiness of SME’s indiscriminately. In this chapter, we describe the integrative era where cyber logistics strives. |
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Collaboration entails the perceived balance of time, cost and risk among the working parties. How to choose parties or agents to work together intelligently is highlighted in the ANP model on the selection of logistics agents. Such model can be realized online under the conceptualization of three interrelated ideas that solidify collaborative nature of cyber logistics. The first idea is to allow parties of different logistics capabilities partnered to provide a collaborative service that is competitive with credibility, reliability and viability ensured among all parties. With this dynamic partnership, e-collaboration is enabled per integrative level of each party facilitated by, e.g., the any-to-any communicative design of the ePlatform environment. The e-Collaboration paradigm coalesces diverse views on collaboration into one framework with five levels of integration. Thirdly, a decision support mechanism is such designed that enabled individualized decision process that also becomes part of the collaborative team decision sub-process with global alignment of requirements (as cost, risk and time). Logistics e-Services lead to an extension of e-service concept to 3-party e-Service where interactions among partners are native to the service. The ePlatform facilitates the easy deployment of much needed online tools, plugging the gap of going from offline experience-based hired hands to online cyber logistics planning.
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Global supply chain logistics is critically important for international enterprises to sustain competitive accession to the world market. Logistics agents should be enabled to utilize optimally the distributed logistics resources in shipment planning for these enterprises.
The planning and management of supply chain logistics is a complex endeavor, involving collaboration of multiple logistics agents to deliver shipments timely, safely and economically. It integrates multiple shippers of different origins and multiple consignees of different destinations, commonly within a global supply chain framework. It is important that a shipment plan be designed to evaluate integrations and consolidations, to assess whether shipments can meet their respective target delivery dates, and to estimate the amount of costs involved. Solution space is assessable with proper theories, models and frameworks.
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In this Part, based on the characteristics of the shipment planning problem, we propose theoretical underpinnings for the design of a highly adoptable intelligent search algorithm for optimizing end-to-end logistics, a decision scheme for logistics agents to develop, evaluate, and revise their shipment plans with reliability targets at a low cost, and a dynamic decision scheme with a shipment bidding and planning model (mixed 0-1 LP) to identify and negotiate potential online shipments and resources with proper biddings.
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To operate effectively online, forwarders, for example, must be able to make shipment planning online as efficient, if not more, as offline, and as advantageous as one might wish offline. Online shipment planning is computationally superior to human intelligence, and algorithmically varies - an inherent property in the multi-modal nature of logistics. Time limit offline often sidesteps meaningful thinking that can be validated at that instance (can’t do it that fast and in that precise – can be evaluated correctly with risk-aware). |
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To sustain in a reasonable manner of cyber logistics industry, an innovative cyber infrastructure must quickly design and deploy accordingly. In here, we leverage the proposed 4th party e-Platform for the air cargo industry with added capabilities to harness the online shipment planning of dynamic partners from the onset of service tendering to the monitoring and asserting of shipment deliverability throughout the process with clear and present visibility. The e-Platform will no doubt leverage the single unique identity characteristics of RFID technology to achieve synchronicity of the ‘rights’ of both time and place. The radio frequency technology acts as a “trailing glue” that in principle the movement of things is Internet visible. Such endeavour calls for standardizations of coding standards (or, the coalescence of existing code schemes to be encapsulated into one code, such as the EPC or Electronic Product Code), transaction representations (such as the like of UBL), and a safe-and-private visibility window (what is the window of opportunity of an opportunity now visible?). Furthermore, on a shared platform, the issue of privacy and security must be revisited. For example, Role-Based Access Control alone cannot address the on-demand sharing setting of two interdependent parties, if not more. Privacy preservation and prevention are necessary but must be preceded by the determination at the time when sharing is requested online. An on-demand entitlement scheme is proposed to ensure privacy is protected and security is enforced.
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| © 2011. All rights reserved. |
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