Enhancing container transportation traceability based on intelligent product and web-services: Model driven approach

Containers transportation involves various intermediate supply-chain actors. These containers are subject to myriad risks that can occur at any moment. In addition, the absence of a specialized stakeholder for securing containers flow and the lack of communication among actors impedes identifying responsibilities when an adverse event arises. For this purpose, we advocate the use of traceability system to enhance containers transportation security. This objective is achieved through enhancing systems interoperability to collect necessary information for identifying risks. Thus, we opted for urbanizing a traceability system to meet the new requirements related to risk management. In this paper, we propose the use of web-services to overcome the problems related to the heterogeneity of systems used by supply-chain stakeholders. Thus, we proposed a development process based on model driven architecture (MDA) to automate the code generation of these web-services. Moreover, we used the concept of intelligent product (IP) to propose an intelligent container able to communicate with external systems and to manage information related to its traceability. This solution is validated by a real case study.   Key words: Intelligent product (IP), model driven architecture (MDA), service oriented architecture (SOA), business process (BP), traceability.