Enabling situation awareness with supply chain event management

Abstract Supply chain event management exploits synergies between IT and logistics and refers to the set of methods and technologies used to efficiently integrate events from all actors and processes of the supply chain. In the context of supply chain event management, we examine how events can be used to leverage situation awareness. In our approach, situation awareness is facilitated by providing the capability to detect situations, which are represented as correlations between simple events, complex events and supply chain objects (e.g., suppliers, 3PL companies, retailers and material resources). We introduce a two-phase event correlation method which first correlates simple events into complex events and then events with supply chain objects. We describe how the proposed model has been implemented in a software framework and we conduct evaluation tests to examine its situation detection capabilities.