Agile Supply Chain Management over the Internet of Things

A supply chain (SC) is a network of supplier, factories, warehouse, distribution centers, retailers, and customers, through which raw materials are acquired, transformed, produced, and delivered to the customers. As a complex network of suppliers, factories, warehouses, distributors, and retailers, the highly effective and efficient operations of a SC depend on the speedily moving of information flows and material flows. The rapid advances in information technology (IT) have always resulted in innovation, such as the Internet, that is terms of its potential as a channel for collecting, transmitting and storing information. As is well-known, the emergence of Internet has made a significant impact on the rapid growth of Internet-based information transfer between companies, their suppliers, and their customers. The Internet has emerged as an effective means of driving information integration and sharing for a supply chain, as well as has supported various coordination mechanisms across a supply chain. To make decisions promptly and to accelerate material flows via the integration and sharing of information flows improve the effectiveness and efficiency of a supply chain execution. However there exists a gap between the material flows and the information flows in a supply chain because of the information flows always can not reflect the wave of material flows real-timely, as well as it is impossible to understand the process of a supply chain execution real-timely. Being the next generation network of the Internet, the Internet of Things (IoT), which is a comprehensive extension of the Internet and also can achieve the pervasive connections between objects (things) and objects (things), information automotive collecting and real-time processing, as well as ubiquitous computing, close the gap between objects in the material world and their representation in information systems. It is able to real-timely monitor the process of a supply chain execution and also to further improve the efficiency and effectiveness of supply chain over the IoT. In this paper, the authors mainly discuss the characteristics of the IoT and enabling technologies, and explore the distributed architecture of SCM over the IoT.