Radically Distributed Supply Chain Systems
- Proposal/paper by Bob Haugen, in 1997!!
URL = http://www.jeffsutherland.org/oopsla97/haugen.html
Description
"The traditional business applications (Customer Orders, Purchase Orders, Accounts Receivable, Accounts Payable, etc.) are cultural artifacts -- not really necessary to doing business, but only to a particular historical form and stage of business. In a world of distributed business objects engaging in electronic commerce, a very different form of business system is possible: one composed of self-similar software components, dynamically linked in flexible configurations, managing multi-company supply chains.
The Resource-Event-Agent (REA) template is a good basic building block for such a system [1]. By merging REA with some ideas from Manufacturing Resource Planning (MRP) , Work Flow Management (WFM) and Constraint-Based Scheduling (CBS) systems, it is possible to design a unified template that can be multiplied and composed to manage any business process.
Because this paper must be short, it will necessarily be over-simplified. But there are voluminous details in the references." (http://www.jeffsutherland.org/oopsla97/haugen.html)
Status
From Bob Haugen in December 2015: "The ideas of Radically Distributed Supply Chain Systems are finally starting to come together in the https://valueflo.ws/ project, but it's early days. It will use the logic and model we and Sensorica developed for NRP, and also used in our previous regional economic ecosystem analysis software. Might become a story for 2016."