Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
of price, quantity, quality parameters of food to be delivered, environmental condi-
tions during the transport or storage, and the compensation in case of SLA-violation.
The negotiated parameters, like quantity, quality, as well as environmental condi-
tions form SLA metrics, which are used by the SLA-Monitoring&Evaluator
component for the evaluation of the SLA. The SLA-Negotiator is connected to the
SLA-Template Repository, where SLA-Templates are stored. The SLA-Template
reflects a capacity offered by a company on the market. The Globus Toolkit based
SLA-Negotiator used in AgroGrid, was developed within the BEinGRID project
and was adapted during the implementation of the AgroGrid platform.
The
VO-Management
component is used for the setup and management of
partner memberships in supply chains. As already noted, a supply chain in AgroGrid
is formed by those parties, who participate in the sale, delivery and production of
particular product or food trade unit. A party wanting to create a new supply chain,
adopts the role of a supply chain manager (SC-Manager), uses the VO-Management
component for the management of parties participating in the supply chain, called
supply chain members (SC-Member). Before a party can participate in a supply
chain, it needs to negotiate a SLA with the supply chain manager. The .NET based
VO-Management (called VO-Setup) component used for the realisation of the
AgroGrid platform was developed within the BEinGRID project.
The
Track&Trace
component consists of an Enterprise Resource Planning
system (ERP) and GTNet®'s distributed Traceability Information Exchange (TIX)
databases. Users are able to choose whether they want to run their TIX by using
their own hardware facilities or if they want to use a software as a service hosted
by TraceTracker AG. In both cases, companies need to pay a license fee and they
need to build a XML-file which describes all products and their relevant properties
in general.
Later on, any ERP system can serve as a source of tracking and tracing infor-
mation, as well as a source of monitoring information about quality and environ-
mental conditions of food trade units during their production, storage, transpor-
tation or delivery. The tracking and tracing information, as well as monitoring
information provided by the ERP is stored in the TIX database. The TIX also
provides interfaces for querying traceability and monitoring information stored in
the TIXs of the supply chain members. The access to TIXs of the supply chain
members is mediated by a local TIX, and is secured by mechanisms provided by
GTNet-Hub (Global Traceability Network-Hub) which interconnects all TIXs. The
Traceability Information Exchange databases, as well as the GTNet-Hub are part
of the TraceTracker's GTNet® platform and were coupled by the usage of the web
service based interfaces to the other AgroGrid services, allowing querying the TIXs.
The
SLA-Monitoring&Evaluator
component is responsible for the automated
monitoring and evaluation of negotiated SLAs. In order to obtain monitoring
information of received food trade units, the component queries monitoring data
stored in local TIX databases and in TIXs of the supply chain members. Later, the
queried information is transformed into the metrics, as defined in the SLAs. The
monitored SLA-metrics are compared and evaluated against the evaluation criteria
defined in the SLAs by the SLA-Evaluator. In case of SLA violation detection, the
