A Synergistic Approach towards Autonomic Event Management in Supply Chains

Abstract

Supply Chains (SCs), due to their very nature and intent (e.g., embracing change in markets, products, manufacturing, partners, globalization) in conjunction with market pressures, will face ongoing challenges that are necessarily reflected on the Information Technology (IT) infrastructure used to manage and optimise their operations. Supply Chain Management Software (SCMS) typically covers the various functional aspects of SCs, including integration technology. The result of the IT integrations is a form of an information supply chain, including computational representation s of physical SC entities. For purposes of this chapter SCMS will be considered to incorporate any ERP solutions and/or IT infrastructure utilized to enable the information integration required to support the SCs. Current SC IT challenges include decision making, collaboration, and attaining qualities such as scalability, performance, integratability, correctness, and reliability in the face of the perpetual dynamics and increasing complexity of SCs. To avoid disruptions to SCs, Supply Chain Event Management (SCEM) considers the set of possible event scenarios and plans solutions. Events can be either representations of realworld events or can be introduced as a side-effect of the Information Systems (IS) supporting the SC (IT events). SCs can achieve their goals for optimal management of operations only to the extent and degree that they manage and automate the necessary information flow, especially with regard to managing unexpected events. The effective handling of potentially disruptive events is vital to achieving the aforementioned qualities, yet the ongoing change (mirrored in the IT sy stems) in entities and the properties and relations thereof, necessarily limits the sufficiency and totality of pr edefined solutions. A synergistic approach that leverages various computing paradigms can provide improved SCEM solutions. In the face of potentially disruptive SC and IT events (referred to as SCEs in this chapter), autonomic computing (AC), inspired by the human autonomic nervous system, with its stated goals of self-configur ation, self-optimization, self-healing, and self-protection (also known as self-X), would appear to be a synergistic candidate for improving SCEM. While some properties defined for autonomic systems1 may not be applicable to SCEM, others will be beneficial. A partial application of AC techniques to achieve improved reactive event