A Review of Supply Chain Data Mining Publications

The use of data mining in supply chains is growing, and covers almost all aspects of supply chain management. A framework of supply chain analytics is used to classify data mining publications reported in supply chain management academic literature. Scholarly articles were identified using SCOPUS and EBSCO Business search engines. Articles were classified by supply chain function. Additional papers reflecting technology, to include RFID use and text analysis were separately reviewed. The paper concludes with discussion of potential research issues and outlook for future development

Impact of RFID and EPCglobal on Critical Processes of the Pharmaceutical Supply Chain

The need to implement and guarantee effective item-level tracing systems is becoming more and more important for a wide range of business applications, such as manufacturing, logistics, healthcare, and anti-counterfeiting. Among these, the pharmaceutical supply chain, with millions of medicines moving around the world and needing to be traced at item level, represents a very interesting reference scenario. Furthermore, the growing counterfeiting problem raises a significant threat within the supply chain system. Recently, several international institutions (e.g. Food and Drug Administration, European Medicines Agency, European Federation of Pharmaceutical Industries and Associations, GS1) are encouraging the use of innovative solutions in healthcare and in the pharmaceutical supply chain, to improve patient safety and enhance the efficiency of the pharmaceutical supply chain, with better worldwide drug traceability

Experimental Performance Evaluation of Passive UHF RFID Tags in Electromagnetically Critical Supply Chains

Radio Frequency Identification is going to play a veryimportant role as auto-identification solution for manyapplication scenarios, where item-level tagging and highperformance are crucial. In such a context, the use of passive Ultra High Frequency (UHF) tags is strongly suggested but, unfortunately, general-purpose commercial tags could not meet all the requirements in presence of critical operating conditions, including the presence of metals and liquids, the misalignment between tag and reader antennas, and the need of multiple reading of tags. In this paper, the main features that a UHF tag should own to work properly in the whole supply chain are presented. A tag, named below Enhanced tag, satisfying all theindividuated requirements has been also realized and validated in a controlled test environment simulating the pharmaceutical supply chain. Tests have been focused on the above-mentioned critical conditions. The performance of the Enhanced tag, in terms of successful read rate, has been compared with that of some commercial Far Field and Near Field UHF tags. The experimental results are impressive and clearly demonstrate that ad hoc Far Field UHF tags are able to effectively solve many of the performance degradation problems affecting generalpurpose tags. Finally, the proposed tag has been also tested in extreme conditions, applying it directly on Tetra Pak packages containing liquid, with interesting results in terms of platformtolerant features

Adoption of artificial intelligence and cutting-edge technologies for production system sustainability: A moderator-mediation analysis

YesCutting-edge technologies like big data analytics (BDA), artificial intelligence (AI), quantum computing, blockchain, and digital twins have a profound impact on the sustainability of the production system. In addition, it is argued that turbulence in technology could negatively impact the adoption of these technologies and adversely impact the sustainability of the production system of the firm. The present study has demonstrated that the role of technological turbulence as a moderator could impact the relationships between the sustainability the of production system with its predictors. The study further analyses the mediating role of operational sustainability which could impact the firm performance. A theoretical model has been developed that is underpinned by dynamic capability view (DCV) theory and firm absorptive capacity theory. This model was verified by PLS-SEM with 412 responses from various manufacturing firms in India. There exists a positive and significant influence of AI and other cutting-edge technologies for keeping the production system sustainable

P2P Data Synchronization for Product Lifecycle Management

Abstract Intelligent products are an undeniable asset for efficient Product Lifecycle Management (PLM), providing ways to capture events related to physical objects at various locations and times. Today and more than ever before, PLM tools and systems must be built upon standards for enhancing interoperability among all product stakeholders and developing tools independent of specific vendors, applications, and operating systems. Based on this observation, this paper develops strategies to improve "information sustainability" in PLM environments using standardized communication interfaces defined by a recent standard proposal named Quantum Lifecycle Management (QLM) messaging standards. More concretely, data synchronization models based upon QLM standards are developed to enable the synchronization of product-related information among various systems, networks, and organizations involved throughout the product lifecycle. Our proposals are implemented and assessed based on two distinct platforms defined in the healthcare and home automation sectors

Development of a software framework for transforming RFID data in value-added information for the fashion supply chain

Nella primavera 2010 RFID Lab, laboratorio dell'Università di Parma, in collaborazione con un Board of Advisors composto da aziende del settore moda, ha avviato il progetto RFID Fashion Pilot per reingegnerizzare tramite tecnologia RFID una supply chain fashion. Questo lavoro tratta lo sviluppo e la validazione sperimentale di moduli software in grado di generare informazioni a valore aggiunto a partire dai dati RFID acquisiti lungo la catena logistica. Il sistema realizzato recupera i dati RFID tramite l'infrastruttura standard dell'EPCglobal Network, interrogando due sistemi EPCIS remoti. Questi dati sono poi elaborati in informazioni di Business Intelligence ed inseriti in un sistema data warehouse. È stata poi realizzata un'applicazione web con cui l'utente può accedere a queste informazioni. Questa interfaccia fornisce diversi moduli specializzati per l'analisi di Track and Trace, Inventari e altri tipi di dati.In Spring 2010 the RFID Lab at University of Parma, together with a Board of Advisors of fashion companies, started a research project called RFID Fashion Pilot. The project's goal is the reengineering of the fashion supply chain processes using RFID technology. This work discusses the development and in-field testing of a software framework designed to transform RFID raw data in value-added information. The system retrieves the data generated by RFID logistics processes using the standard EPCglobal Network architecture, querying two remote EPC Information Services (EPCIS). The EPCIS events are then parsed to extract valuable information for Business Intelligence, and loaded into a data warehouse system. A web application has been developed through which the user can query, filter and sort the BI information. This web interface provides specialized modules for analyzing Track and Trace, Inventories, Replenishment and other data

Innovative algorithms and data structures for signal treatment applied to ISO/IEC/IEEE 21451 smart transducers

2014 - 2015Technologies and, in particular sensors, permeate more and more application sectors. From energy management, to the factories one, to houses, environments, infrastructure, and building monitoring, to healthcare and traceability systems, sensors are more and more widespread in our daily life. In the growing context of the Internet of Things capabilities to acquire magnitudes of interest, to elaborate and to communicate data is required to these technologies. These capabilities of acquisition, elaboration, and communication can be integrated on a unique device, a smart sensor, which integrates the sensible element with a simple programmable logic device, capable of managing elaboration and communication. An efficient implementation of communication is required to these technologies, in order to better exploit the available bandwidth, minimizing energy consumption. Moreover, these devices have to be easily interchangeable (plug and play) in such a way that they could be easily usable. Nowadays, smart sensors available on the market reveal several problems such as programming complexity, for which depth knowledge is required, and limited software porting capability. The family of standards IEEE 1451 is written with the aim to define a set of common communication interfaces. These documents come from the Institute of Electric and Electronic Engineers (IEEE) with the aim to create a standard interface which allows devices interoperability produced from different manufacturers, but it is not concerned with problems related to bandwidth, management, elaboration and programming. For this family of standards, now under review, it is expected a further development, with the aim to renew applicable standards, and to add new layers of standardization. The draft of the ISO/IEC/IEEE 21451.001 proposes to solve problems related to the bandwidth and the elaboration management, relocating a part of processing in the point of acquisition, taking advantage of elaboration capabilities of smart sensors. This proposal is based on a Real Time Segmentation and Labeling algorithm, a new sampling technique, which allows to reduce the high number of samples to be transferred, with the same information content. This algorithm returns a data structure, according to which the draft expects two elaboration layers: a first layer, in order to elaborate basic information of the signal processing, and a second layer, for more complex elaboration. [edited by author]XIV n.s