Integrating material and information flows using a distributed peer-to-peer information system

摘要

The management of item-level information is one of the biggest challenges currently facing supply chain management. Managing product-related information grows ever more difficult because increasing product customisation adds to the amount and variety of product-related information, and increasingly complex supply networks complicate the integration of product information databases. A potential solution for the problems of item-level information management is moving to product centric information management, namely centralising the information to individual products and accessing the relevant information directly through them. This paper presents an approach and a system for managing item-level information. The system is based on software agents, peer-to-peer information sharing, and a coding scheme that utilises the already allocated domain names of the Internet. Applications of the system to tracking and logistics control are reviewed.