Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
to individual supply chain roles and arranged in order to build up a linear supply
chain over certain steps.
From a technical point of view, AgroGrid demonstrates that already existing
Grid computing components can successfully be adopted to build up a working
and promising business solution. Adoption, integration and customisation of avail-
able components are not a time consuming, risky and costly ventures. Because of
their Service Oriented Architecture realised as web services, all components can be
invoked easily, even if a web service was written in .NET (like the VO management
component) and the corresponding AgroGrid portlet was implemented in Java.
11.4.2 Evaluation of the Business Scenario
To evaluate the outcomes of the one year project phase, a detailed application
scenario was developed. In traditional fruit supply chains, participants are operating
in fixed boundaries. Producers cooperate with a local consolidator to create a critical
mass for economically efficient export activities. These consolidators are contracting
logistic companies to transport apricots from local producers to retailers. Therefore,
logistic companies offer special containers for shipping the fruits. During shipping,
transport and delivery, the quality and environmental conditions of food-trade units
are monitored. Monitoring data will be evaluated and stored in an (often) hand-
written report.
AgroGrid provides an enhancement of this traditional way of collaboration (see
fig. 11.3). All partners of a fruit supply chain are now able to publish their capaci-
ties in the AgroGrid system by filling in capacity-specific forms. In this first step,
all offered capacities will be characterised by previously elaborated attributes. In a
second step, a certain company (e.g. a retailer) requests capacities in order to fulfill
a special customer demand or to replenish its own capacities. During the third step,
AgroGrid supports all participants in the negotiation phase by offering capacity-
specific SLA templates and by providing sending and retrieving facilities for SLA
offerings. After a company has accepted an SLA offering, it becomes a contracted
partner of the emerging VO. The current state of a VO is always visualised by a
coloured graph in the VO visualisation portlet.
After all negotiations are completed, companies fulfill their SLA contracts and
send their production data into GTNet® during the productive phase of the supply
chain, meaning the VO. Later on, evaluation processes match all SLA agreements
against real data sent to the TIX (Traceability Information Exchange database
of GTNet®) of the corresponding partners (see arrows 4. and 5. in fig. 11.3). If
SLA violations appear to have occurred, the corresponding trade units and
their irregularity are shown in the according AgroGrid portlet. To get further infor-
mation, a user is able to consult GTNet® to trace back the history of a specific trade
unit.
