A Study on the Development of a Process Designer for Logistics Process Modeling

Abstract

For the efficient execution and effective management of business processes, the importance of BPM (business process management) system has been emphasized incrementally over several years. Many companies have been implemented BPM systems and positive reports on their successful deployments have been released. Most of the BPM implementations, however, are focused on the document-oriented process execution environment, which were the major concerns of the conventional workflow management systems. Thus, the process execution still stays on the semi-automatic level that demands lots of manual involvements of users. However, there are some application domains that have few interactions with users but have massive processing volume. In such domains, the process is executed more automatically and modeling of the process is greatly domain-specific. With current BPM systems that mostly target general- purpose business processes, it is hard to successfully meet those domain-specific requirements. Logistics is one of such BPM application domain that requires real-time process tracking for the efficient utilization of the facilities and automatic control of logistics flow. In this paper, we address the design and development of BPM system for logistics application domain. With our L-BPM system that is implemented over the LIT RFID middleware system, we could test the feasibility of logistics specific business process management system.