Study On A Web-Services-based Cross-Platform System For Information Collecting Of Transport Services

In the transition stage to modern logistics, cargo transport process has shown a growing trend of collaboration of multiple logistics service supplier, which highly depends on the information integration amongst potential participants. As the organizer of a whole transport task, the logistics agent needs to collect timely and accurate transport services information broadly. However, the traditional ways of information collection adopted by logistics agents, like via telephone, fax, or public website, are recognized high-labor-cost, mistake-prone, and copartner-fixed. T o help the logistics agent obtain useful transport services information efficiently and achieve collaboration with potential partners, this thesis developed a "Web Services-based Transport Service Information Across-Platforms Collection Systems".The key challenge of building such a system is that the in-house information systems of the logistics services suppliers are mostly independently developed and running on heterogeneous platforms, which cause the difficulty of information interchanging between systems of the logistics agents' and the logistics service suppliers'. To solve this problem, the thesis attempted to use Web Services, the newly-developed distributed computing technology, to the systems. Work which has been done in this thesis is as follows:1. Designed and implemented the "Information Publishing Services", which provides a secure and convenient way for the logistics services suppliers to advertise their transport services.2. Designed a catalog Tmodel of the cargo transport services on the designing of UDDI registry, to support the query condition of Service Type.3. The UDDI query function is added in this information collection systems with no binding to the UDDI server using UDDI4J API.4. Using DOM API to parse the complicated parameter structures, which enable the invocation for user without knowing the input and output parameter structures of the WSs.5. By analyzing the actual process of SOAP messaging, a general "Web Services Dynamic Invocator" is realized so that user can activate any "transport services information publishing services" provided by the service supplier, with no requirement for client-side programming.