Ubiquitous cloud object for fine-grained resource management in e-commerce logistics

Logistics resources are of great importance in E-commerce as the essential factors of production, basically including man, machine and material. Optimization for E-commerce logistics always relys on the real-time information of logistics resources. Actually, these resources are exchanging information continuously when they interacting with each other. Since the management granularity for logistics resources still remains at a coarse level, most of the interaction information between resources cannot be well recorded and organized. To achieve fine-grained management of logistics resources that could provide realtime resources visibility, traceability interoperability and availability is urgently needed. The booming of IoT technologies makes it feasible to realize fine-grained management. However, how to make resources smart to interact with other resources and construct a resources-oriented information network to serve enquiries from EISs has not been well studied. This paper presents a ubiquitous cloud object (UCO) framework for logistics resources to achieve fine-grained management. A ubiquitous cloud object model is proposed to abstractly virtualize heterogeneous logistics resources into cloud mappings. The concept of object cluster achieves the flexible resource granularity with a designed object gateway service (OGS) to construct information network. Aiming at facilitating the integration of UCOs with Enterprise Information Systems (EISs), object chain is used to organize UCOs to fulfill the specific workflows.