The role of strategy in the evolution and innovation of information systems: A simulation experiment

The potential of Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) for increasing supply chain efficiency has been repeatedly stressed by practitioners and researchers alike. The cross-company usage of RFID applications can only work if the collaborating companies agree on the syntax and semantic used. EPCglobal, an international industry consortium, has specified a stack of specifications that enable a standardized identifier to be stored on the RFID tag and all object related data to be kept on the network. Such a standardized concept does not yet exist to store object related data on RFID tags. To minimize the coordination effort as well as the emerging interoperability or integration problems and, therefore, also guarantee wide-spread adoption of the data-on-tag approach, it is advisable to build on existing standards for the storage of data on RFID tags. In this paper, we recommend applying the ISO 13584 standard for parts libraries (PLIB). We conceptualize how to use ISO 13584 to store data on RFID tags and use a case study on a kitchen furniture manufacturer, which uses RFID tagged components in a cross-company application with its suppliers, to develop a scenario for the storage of data on RFID tags

Priority scheduling service for E-commerce web servers

Service scheduling is one of the crucial issues in E-commerce environment. E-commerce web servers often get overloaded as they have to deal with a large number of customers’ requests—for example, browse, search, and pay, in order to make purchases or to get product information from E-commerce web sites. In this paper, we propose a new approach in order to effectively handle high traffic load and to improve web server’s performance. Our solution is to exploit networking techniques and to classify customers’ requests into different classes such that some requests are prioritised over others. We contend that such classification is financially beneficial to E-commerce services as in these services some requests are more valuable than others. For instance, the processing of “browse” request should get less priority than “payment” request as the latter is considered to be more valuable to the service provider. Our approach analyses the arrival process of distinct requests and employs a priority scheduling service at the network nodes that gives preferential treatment to high priority requests. The proposed approach is tested through various experiments which show significant decrease in the response time of high priority requests. This also reduces the probability of dropping high priority requests by a web server and thus enabling service providers to generate more revenue