Towards Real-Time Data Acquisition for Simulation of Logistics Service Systems

Driven by rising competition pressure companies began to outsource at least parts of their logistics functions to specialized logistics providers in order to concentrate on the core competences. Hence, new business models emerged like the fourth party logistics provider who acts like a coordinator of arising logistics networks. One of the main tasks of the provider is the planning of such logistics networks, which have a very collaborative and dynamic character. In this paper an efficient way to integrate process modeling and simulation as part of the planning phase is introduced. Furthermore, an integrated approach is introduced for supporting the planning by a better data acquisition in order to provide reliable results at an affordable effort using simulation techniques. Therefore, complex event processing is used to gather real-time data and provides the data as service profiles for simulation.