Internet of Things: Sustainability and adoption in logistics service providers – an exploratory study

Objectives This thesis is aimed to explore the adoption of IoT technologies in logistics service providers and to examine whether or not the adoption of IoT will lead to improved sustainability in these firms, given that there is a literature gap in the implementation of IoT in LSPs and the sustainability impact it brings. Specifically, the main objectives of the thesis are to examine the ideal circumstances that facilitate the adoption of IoT technologies in LSPs, answer the question of whether this adoption would lead to sustainability, and propose recommendations for future LSP adopters as well as a framework for further study in the area. Summary The thesis has conducted interviews with participants from different locations in the world to explore the motivations, necessary existing resources, and the challenges in the adoption of IoT by LSPs. Content analysis is administered to gain insights into these variables. These findings lead to a framework for future research on the variables that have an influence on the adoption of IoT. Then, detailed recommendations for companies going through such process of integration are devised and discussed. Conclusions In conclusion, the rate of IoT adoption in LSPs is relatively low, compared to the rising percentage of such practices in the supply chain field. The thesis discovers the motivations behind the adoption of IoT in LSPs, which includes perceived benefits, necessary existing resources, challenges in adoption, sustainability, external corporate forces, and COVID-19 pandemic. The recommendations made by the thesis concern the expertise, long-term mindset, cloud infrastructure, and financial aspects of LSPs wanting to adopt the technology. LSPs need to have managerial expertise of the technology, possess a long-term mindset, emphasize on the cloud infrastructure scale and safety, and focus on financial stability before attempting to implement IoT technologies in their operations

Modeling and Deploying IoT-Aware Business Process Applications in Sensor Networks

The concept of the Internet of Things (IoT) is an important part of the next generation of information. Wireless sensor networks are composed of independent distributed smart sensor nodes and gateways. These discrete sensors constantly gather external physical information, such as temperature, sound, and vibration. Owing to the diversity of sensor devices and the complexity of the sensor sensing environment, the direct modeling of an IoT-aware business process application is particularly difficult. In addition, how to effectively deploy those designed applications to discrete servers in the heterogeneous sensor networks is also a pressing problem. In this paper, we propose a resource-oriented modeling approach and a dynamic consistent hashing (DCH)-based deploying algorithm to solve the above problems. Initially, we extended the graphic and machine-readable model of Business Process Model Notation (BPMN) 2.0 specification, making it able to support the direct modeling of an IoT-aware business process application. Furthermore, we proposed the DCH-based deploying algorithm to solve the problem of dynamic load balancing and access efficiency in the distributed execution environment. Finally, we designed an actual extended BPMN plugin in Eclipse. The approach presented in this paper has been validated to be effective