Collaborative Business Processes (cBPs) form the backbone of enterprise integration. With the growing reliance on the web as a medium of business collaboration, there is an increasing need to quickly and dynamically form cBPs. However, current Business-to-Business (B2B) information systems are still static in nature, and are unable to dynamically form cBPs based on high-level Business Goals (BGs)and their underlying criteria (e.g., item cost, product name, order quantity, etc). This paper introduces the Business-OWL (BOWL), an ontology rooted in the Web Ontology Language (OWL), and modeled as a Hierarchical Task Network (HTN) for the dynamic formation of business processes. An ontologized extension and augmentation of traditional HTN, BOWL describes business processes as a hierarchical ontology of decomposable business tasks encompassing all possible decomposition permutations. Through BOWL, high-level business goals (e.g., "Buy”) can be easily decomposed right down to the lowest level tasks (e.g., "Send Purchase Order”), effectively bridging the gap between high-level business goals with operational level tasks and complementing currently static business process modeling languages. The design of BOWL and a case study demonstrating its implementation are also discussed.

In aerospace maintenance, repair and overhaul (MRO) industry, tracking and tracing the aircraft components using radio frequency identification (RFID) technology can tremendously improve operational efficiency, safety, security, and customer satisfaction. MRO works are performed at both process and operation levels. Due to the mobility requirement, the operation-level track and trace is usually implemented with mobile handheld device (MHD). To cope with the inherent constraints of mobile device including unreliability network connectivity and limited processing power, a MHD system design robust over network failure is proposed. To facilitate the information exchange and data synchronization between MHD and backend systems, an Integrated RFID Information Management and Synchronization (IRIMS) system is proposed. A prototype for the proposed MHD and IRIMS systems is implemented and the testing results confirm the effectiveness of the proposed designs.

Integrating RFID data into an enterprise application has been a challenge to RFID adoption, especially for small to medium enterprises. So far RFID middleware has been used to bridge RFID readers and enterprise applications. As middleware and enterprise application are usually deployed using different platform, it proved to be complicated and costly to realize real-time integration. This paper proposes an event-driven business process management approach that unifies RFID event processing and business event processing. The approach exploits event driven architecture to efficiently manage the event data, and also to provide one single extensible platform for enterprises to extend that functional capability. It fully complies with service oriented architecture by leveraging the loose-coupling and vertical integration capability.

Crossdocking is a warehousing strategy that moves products through flow consolidation centers or crossdocks without putting them into storage. To address various decision problems associated with crossdocking operations planning and scheduling, a careful modeling of the entire crossdocking operation is a prerequisite. This paper describes the development of a novel resource-constrained crossdocking model to address an important crossdocking planning problem which is the scheduling of trucks at crossdocking terminals. A mixed integer programming (MIP) model is proposed to formulate the truck scheduling problem. For the lack of real test data, the procedure of generating synthetic data is discussed and its compatibility to real-world applications is justified. The paper also discusses whether the crossdock capacity is a bottleneck resource in the operation of truck scheduling or not. The steps mentioned above build a realistic reliable framework to design and evaluate various sort of algorithms for this combinatorial optimization problem as our future work.

The RFID and positioning system technologies are the key enablers for logistics supply chain visibility and tracking. While RFID is useful for inventory and material handling processes in warehouses, as soon as the RFID-tagged goods leave the warehouses, one often lose track of them until the next loading docks. In-between the sending and receiving points, there is often no tracking of the cargo which may be at risk of missing, off-loading and delay especially if the cargo is critical or perishable. The positioning system such as GPS (Global Positioning System) is usually used to track the vehicle; however it only provides a geographical location without associating business process info. The present research targets at a total solution architecture for seamless, global wide, track and trace system for logistics supply chain using an integrated RFID and positioning system technologies. The research involves development of a new solution for track and trace using both RFID and GPS, integrated information management models and web-based services. It can integrate RFID events with geographical location information and associate them with the cargo, so that the cargo can be seamlessly tracked and traced.

Increased trade and globalization has created an increasing need for the dynamic formulation and integration of cross-enterprise collaborative business processes (cBP’s). However, current systems and methodologies, being static in nature, are unable to dynamically formulate cBP’s based on business goals and selection criteria. Much of this stems from the current inability to bridge high level strategic business goals to low-level operational tasks, and the inability to dynamically decompose compound business process tasks into primitive operational tasks for direct Web service execution.In this paper, we demonstrate how the concepts from hierarchical task network (HTN) planning are feasible for dynamically creating cBP task sequences ideal for direct Web service execution. We also establish the rationale behind modeling business-to-business (B2B) collaboration tasks as hierarchical Web ontologies. To demonstrate the achievability of dynamic cBP formulation, we developed the Genesis methodology, which consists of (1) Business-OWL (BOWL) - a B2B hierarchical task Web ontology, and (2) the Genesis algorithm – an extension of the hierarchical task network (HTN) planning algorithm to handle business criteria and control flows commonly found in business processes.

B2B collaborations today are typically short-term and dynamic, so it is imperative that business processes be quickly and accurately forged. This paper details research that combines both the context-aware (CA) approach and analytic hierarchy process (AHP) technique to select and rank potential partners in context-enabled B2B collaborations. The approach was validated by a case study. A review of context-aware applications and the criteria for the selection of potential partners are also presented.

Enterprise Integration (EI) is critical to the success of a supply chain by enabling the exchange, sharing and retrieval of information across enterprises. To adapt to changes quickly especially in the trend towards adaptive supply chains, efficient and effective B2B interactions and communication capabilities are important for companies, where short and dynamic connections for seamless information flow across different value chains is needed for dynamic business partnership formation. Current web technologies, or Web 1.0 technologies, have shown limitations such as dull Internet client interfaces, slow responsiveness in information retrieval, and system centric information publish and consumption. The emergence of "Web 2.0 technologies" offers both a paradigm shift and introducing innovative capabilities. This paper presents our approach for a systematic study on how Web 2.0 technologies can improve the B2B interactions and communication capabilities for EI in supply chain. Research work focuses on: Rich client applications using Ajax, information push-model using RSS and service-centric software models in SaaS. Review and analysis are given in the paper followed by a proof-of-concept prototype on SaaS.