Designing Essential Components For Logistics Data Spaces: Connecting Logistics interfaces, Converters, Knowledge, and Standards

Abstract

Data-sharing, in today’s business environment, is perceived by many industrial sectors as the key to unlocking innovative and mutually beneficial business models. Past studies in several business domains reported that IT-supported data-sharing has enabled supply chain partners to improve their core business. Especially in the transport logistics sector, IT allows LSPs and their customers to share information such as purchase orders and shipment details to support smooth business process coordination and other operational purposes. Despite that, establishing a data-sharing ecosystem comes with its own set of impediments, such as conflicting data formats and schema. These challenges make the process of connecting companies’ enterprise systems to data-sharing platforms challenging. The lack of technical enforcement in disclosing their data, particularly, how their data is going to be accessed, used, and proliferated, sets back companies’ willingness to share data even more. These concerns in the data-sharing led to the adoption of the IDS initiative that puts forwards trust, security, interoperability, and data sovereignty in mind by distributing the responsibility of establishing such a data-sharing ecosystem into several trusted business roles and application components, such as the IDS Connector and IDS Data Apps. However, instantiating a complete IDS ecosystem calls for an elaborate effort, and participating and exchanging data in data space is not yet seen as economically attractive. Furthermore, prior to joining a data space, candidate data space’s participants will also need to explore available IDS Connector(s) suitable for their use case and capability. This situation calls for the development of a Connector Store as a broker system that can facilitate the discovery and selection of IDS Connectors, data sources, as well as participants active in a data space. Given these project motivations and problem statements, this EngD thesis aims to investigate a suitable design of a Connector Store and other related application components comprising a data space for the logistics sector essential for managing data interoperability, data sovereignty, and resource discovery. The design process starts with a Problem Investigation that identifies (1) the stakeholders involved in this design project and their expectations, (2) the challenges of data-sharing in the logistics industry and the latest solution to such problems, and (3) the interplay between the proposed Connector Store with other business roles and application components in managing data interoperability, data sovereignty, and resource discovery. Next, the work is followed with a Treatment Design, in which requirements elicitation and software and enterprise architecture design of the relevant application components for managing data interoperability, data sovereignty, and resource discovery take place. Then, this thesis is finalized with a Treatment Validation, in which we (1) instantiate a logistics data space demonstrator through the development of the essential application components based on the proposed design and (2) validate the contribution of the logistics data space demonstrator to achieving stakeholders’ goals of managing data interoperability, data sovereignty, and resource discovery. From the demonstration and interview with experts, we reached the conclusion that the proposed architecture of the logistics data space is suitable for participants in a real-world scenario to handle these three issues. The IDS Data Apps requested from a Connector Store and orchestrated by IDS Connectors can support data space participants solve data interoperability problems to a certain extent. The implementation of the data usage policy enforcement as accommodated by the proposed architecture also connects well with the need for a technically enforced trust for future ad-hoc data exchange. To further promote the value of realizing such a logistics data space, there is also a proposition resulting from the panel discussion to imbue the ecosystem with complementary customized brokering and consulting services. Based on these results, we argue that this EngD thesis has managed to (1) demonstrate the technical feasibility of developing the proposed IDS-compliant logistics data space brokered by a Connector Store to lower data interoperability, data sovereignty, and resource discovery issues, and (2) provide the lesson learned from the development and validation that can serve as a basis for the future related research endeavor.