Interconnected Service Models -- Emergence of a Comprehensive Logistics Service Model

Abstract

Logistics service industry is characterized by a high level of collaboration between logistics customers and providers. In recent years sophisticated, knowledge-intense business models such as fourth party and lead logistics evolved that are responsible for planning, coordination, and monitoring entire supply chains across logistics companies. The Logistics Service Engineering and Management (LSEM) platform is a service-oriented infrastructure for the development and management of collaborative contract logistics enabling fourth party and lead logistics. The Service Modeling Framework (SMF) is a pivotal element of the LSEM platform. It allows users of the platform to define, manage and combine logistics services from different providers and allows for an integrated view on complex services setups. In doing so, the SMF enables fourth party and lead logistics not only to work with logistics services but to integrate related service models in order to realize an interconnection of models thus leading to the emergence of a comprehensive logistics service model. In this paper we present how to accomplish the bottom up construction of a comprehensive service model on metamodel as well as on model level and present resulting benefits of interconnected models in terms of information extraction and transformation and in terms of flexibility and robustness of the overall approach.