Research In The Supply Chain Management Information System Based On Grid Theory

Nowadays, with the development and innovation of the information technology, the enterprises have entered a globalization and network competitive economic era. The Internet plays an important role in this kind of business environment. It has become the cooperative and communicating basement between the enterprises. The traditional supply chain has switched towards the supply chain based on Internet. The cooperation of the supply chain has become the new management strategy of the supply chain.In the 90s of 20th century, because of the trend of high rate of the increase of the hosts and relative low utility of the individual, the NFS tried to combine the four super compute center into one compute unit. As a result, the conception of Grid came to the world. Grid is regarded as the next generation of Internet. It is not the substitution of Internet and Web, but the development of them. Grid is the attempt to integrate the resource in the Internet into one huge Super Computer. Grid tries to realize the complete sharing of the computing resource, storage resource, information resource, knowledge resource and expertise resource. At present, the construct of the Grid has become the hotspot of IT area. In America, Europe and China, millions of the money is invested on this project every year.Internet plays an important role in the cooperation of the supply chain. Grid which is the development of Internet will be supposed to play an important role in this area, too. According the prediction of Gartner, the main usage of the Grid to the enterprises is to deal with the computing-denseness work loading, such as the complicated business and financial analysis before 2006. And then, Grid will cross the boundary of the enterprises and support the cooperation between the enterprises. Finally, it will completely support the Utility Computing service. The issues such as how the supply chain will develop in the Grid environment, how to take advantage of the Grid to advance the information cooperation within the supply chain, how to design an build the SCMIS in the Grid environment has become the frontier of the research of the SCM. The existing researches have not built an efficient academic and analytical system to give the instruction to the member companies of the supply chain to help them build the information system based on Grid to realize the cooperation between them. In this paper, we will research the construction of the SCMIS based on Grid from the views such as the trend of the commercial application of the Grid, the application strategy, the model of the system and its contribution to the SCM and try to provide a better solution for the member of supply chain to help them implement the information system based on Grid.This paper will be divided into five sections. The first section will summarize the existing researches in the theory of SCM, Grid and the application of Grid in the SCM. The second section will analyze the Grid's infection on the information coordination within the supply chain and its developing roadmap. The third section will research the strategy of constructing the Supply Chain Management Information System based on Grid and the real system model. The fourth section will study the interaction between the members of the supply chain using the information system based on Grid. The last section will analyze the Grid system's contribution to the SCM and information coordination.In the first section, it points out that IT plays an extremely important role in the increase of the competencies of the supply chain and Grid, as the new production of the innovation of IT, will promote the ability of information sharing and coordination within the supply chain. And then, it analyzes the actuality of researches in the theory of SCM, Grid and its commercial applications and indicates the issues in the existing researches. Finally, it introduces the thought and signification of this paper.In the second section, it first briefly analyzes the coordination mechanism in the activities of supply chain. Then, it pays much attention to the analysis of the development and contribution of information coordination. At last, it analyzes how the Grid will change the commercial environment of the supply chain and describes the blueprint of the application of Grid and its current position.In the third section, it researches the up to date standard of Grid, such as OGSA and WSRF, which are where the shoe pinches of applying the Grid in the commercial environment and are the technical base of the whole paper. Furthermore, it brings forward the strategy of three levels virtualization of constructing the MIS based on Grid (in Chapter 4) and designs the model of the SCMIS based on Grid under the instruction of this strategy. Finally, it analyses the information infrastructure, the design of application layer, the security, Quality of Service and the feasibility of this system model (in Chapter 5).In the fourth section, it studies how the members of supply chain communicate with each other, by using the workflow management to compose and control the Web services in the application layer of the system model, to realize the business processes in supply chain and designs a two-tier workflow system. Meanwhile, it also analyzes how to take advantage of the Web Services in the application layer of the model to realize the exchange of the information between the enterprises and brings forward an analytical method which uses the Time based Petri Net (TPN). (in Chapter 6)In the fifth section, it analyses the contribution of the SCMIS based on Grid to the resolving of the problems in the SCM, including the support to the Enterprise Application Integration (EAI), the decrease of the Bullwhip Effects by supporting the model of VMI and CPFR, the increase of the flexibility of the supply chain management and supply chain information management system, (in Chapter 7)At last, it concludes the whole research work and briefly discuss the orient of the latter research work.