Dynamic Communication across Supply Chain Services

This thesis deals with the design of communication protocol solutions across a Supply Chain Management System. These solutions are capable of operating in multi-agent environments, and allow customers to order services online. As part of two Australian Research Council (ARC) grants, it is divided into four main sections. The first issue deals with a dynamic communication protocol, which aims at agent-to-agent operability in an open environment, such as the Internet. In the second section, we proposed a protocol correctness system, which enables detection of deadlock errors in communication protocols. Further, a comparison of the proposed validation techniques and those currently in use, is provided. Next, the problem of routing and scheduling in the transport industry was tackled, resulting in the development of an autonomous route scheduling system, MIDAS (Mobile Intelligent Distributed Application Software). The MIDAS server uses wireless technology to communicate with different parts of the system, which was investigated in the final section of the thesis. The MIDAS system was tested on devices with a GSM-enabled network connection, with results indicating that it takes less than thirty seconds for information to be processed and transmitted. Further, studies relating to this topic could involve extensions of the proposed systems using SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol). While undertaking my PhD, I wrote the following five papers, which were published in various journals and conferences: 1. Towards the Right Communication Protocol for Web Services, International Journal for Web Services Research (IJWSR), June 2005 2. MIDAS An Integrated E-Commerce Solution for the Australian Transport Industries, International Journal on Web Engineering and Technology (IJWET), 1(3), 353-373, October 2004 3. MIDAS’s Routing and Scheduling Approach for the Australian Transport Industries, International OTM (OntheMove) Workshops, November 2003 4. An XML-based Conversational Protocol for Web Services, 18th ACM International Symposium on Applied Computing (SAC), 1179-1184, May 2003 5. Towards Robust and Scalable Infrastructure for Web Service, IEEE International Symposium on Signal Processing and Information Technology (ISSPIT), December 2002