Supply Chain as a Service: A Cloud Perspective on Supply Chain Systems

Supply chains are characterized by multiple firms providing their resources and processes to meeting customer demand in an efficient manner. There exists a great variety of approaches for solving the inherent coordination problem. It has been acknowledged that the autonomy of supply chain participants – and their business objectives – as well as the contractual relations between participants have to be maintained when designing a coordination mechanism. Often, new mechanisms are triggered by innovation in the software industry. This paper adopts the basic idea of Cloud Computing and takes a Cloud perspective on supply chain systems: It proposes to represent supply chains as a set of service offerings and customer demand as service requests; coordination is then a problem of determining optimal service compositions. We evaluate our proposal in a case study of airport service supply chains.