Go with the Flow - Design of Cloud Logistics Service Blueprints

By adopting principles of cloud computing to the logistics domain the paradigm of Cloud Logistics is derived. It appears to be a promising paradigm in order to evolve logistics into being more flexible and collaborative. Yet, appropriate concepts that enable the cloud logistics paradigm are missing. In the paper, existing body of literature is reviewed and a definition and a framework of cloud logistics is given. Further, service blueprinting is combined with domain engineering and general morphological analysis in order to create a suitable method for designing cloud oriented service blueprints. Those are focusing on domain-specific flows and transformations enabling cloud oriented business collaboration. The method is applied to the logistics domain and a cloud logistics service blueprint is designed. Finally, the concept is evaluated with real use cases from logistics service providers. Keywords-Logistics, Service, Blueprinting, Cloud Logistics, Resource Virtualization, Service Encapsulation I. MOTIVATION AND METHODOLOGY For years, logistics is facing the trends of outsourcing and concentration on core competencies [1], [2]. In order to fulfill complex customer demands in such an environment of specialized logistics service providers (LSP), selection of and collaboration between them is obligatory. For the selection of LSP, flexibility in terms of ability of adaption to changing customer requirements, responsiveness to target market, handling of specific requirements and time response capability is an important evaluation criteria [2], [3], [4]. Flexibility and performance of logistics services can be increased [5] by the adoption of a service oriented paradigm [6], [7], which is also the foundation for the principles of cloud computing (CC) (’...-as-a-Service’) [8], [9]. This comprises on the one hand encapsulation, composability, loose coupling, and reusability (adapted from service orientation) and on the other hand virtualization of resources, ad-hoc reconfiguration and inter-connectability of resources (adapted from CC). The adoption of those principles to the logistics domain to the most possible extent leads to the idea of Cloud Logistics (CL) as discussed in [10]. Its core idea is the virtualization of both IT and physical logistics resources and their encapsulation in logistics services in order to provide flexible and customized logistics solutions. It is pointed out, CL is still a topic in its infancy, just existing as an theoretical concept and potential fields of further research are discussed [10]. The most promising field is a comprehensive service model based on logistics resources and ensuring compatibility through coherent (data) interfaces, which is crucial in order to combine services and resources of different LSP. This conforms to the results of Gupta et al. [11] and Arnold et al. [12]. They found simple communication between stakeholders, ease of use and convenience (which are enabled through comprehensive models and compatibility) to be the topmost success factor of CC ([11] for small and medium enterprises in general and [12] for logistics enterprises in particular). Hence, those factors are assumed to enable the success of CL as well. Ease of use through compatibility and a comprehensive model can be provided by a modular construction kit [13] that is based on generic compatible building blocks that represents the comprehensive service model. Thus, the idea of Cloud Logistics Service Blueprints (CLSB) arises that can be configured and specified to virtualize and represent the various logistics services in a network and their resources. By virtualizing and encapsulating with the help of the same CLSB, compatibility of services and their resources is granted and CL is enabled. Eventually, the engineering of such a blueprint is a challenging task that answers the leading research question: ’How can the logistics domain and its essential resources be analyzed, described, abstracted and categorized in order to create a logisticsed and categorized in order to create a logistics service blueprint that enables cloud logistics?’ that is solved with the following sub-questions: • SQ1: What is the leading definition of cloud logistics? • SQ2: What are suitable service engineering methods for creating cloud oriented service blueprints? • SQ3: What is an appropriate conceptualization of the logistics domain (description, flows, interfaces, transformations) in order to develop Cloud Logistics Service Blueprints for enabling cloud logistics? As CL is a theoretical concept [10], an empirical observation is not possible. Hence, the design-science paradigm for information systems [14] is chosen and the design-oriented information systems research approach [15] is applied as the leading methodological framework. Its phases of analysis, design, evaluation and diffusion shape the structure of the paper by using specific methods, see Figure 1. The analysis is conducted in section II with a systematic literature review 5058 Proceedings of the 50th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences | 2017 URI: http://hdl.handle.net/10125/41776 ISBN: 978-0-9981331-0-2