Autonomic tracing of production processes with mobile and agent-based computing

Tracing items in a supply chain, across different enterprises and through the full processes scope, is today an inherently complex design task. Enterprises are typically comprised of hundreds of applications that are custom built at different times, acquired from third parties and parts of legacy systems, and also operating in multiple tiers of different manufacturing and information system platforms. Further, traceability is characterized by a goal-oriented approach, in which business-process analyses are driven by goal achievements rather than by systematic engineering processes. The use of a classical enterprise integration approach mostly needs tailoring to different applications. Due to the number and diversity of the systems and of their interactions, and to their dynamicity, it is difficult, costly, and therefore often not convenient to develop in large scale distributed systems. To overcome these issues, a supply chain traceability system with a high level of automation is discussed in this paper. In particular, the system adopts an agent-based approach, in which cooperative software agents find solutions to back-end tracing problems by self-organization. Such cooperative agents are based on a business process aware traceability model, and on a service-oriented composition paradigm. Furthermore, an interface agent assists each user to carry out the front-end tracking activities. Interface agents rely on the context-awareness paradigm to gain self-configurability and self-adaptation of the user interface, and on ubiquitous computing technology, i.e., mobile devices and radio-frequency identification, to perform agile and automatic lot identification. The paper comprises real-world experiences on the fashion supply chain. (C) 2010 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.