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About CoBIs
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The project CoBIs develops a novel service-oriented approach to support business processes that involve physical entities (goods, tools, etc.) in large-scale enterprise environments. Software systems that provide various services for enterprise businesses are usually based on highly decentralized, manual and thus often error-prone data collection and a more centralized data storage and business logic execution in so called "back-end" systems. An important intention of this project is to apply recent advances in the area of sensor networks, in order to distribute business logic functionality to "smart" physical entities. In this way, the status of enterprises, as it is represented in business processes and in the supporting enterprise software systems, can reflect more closely what is actually happening in the real world. 
It is state of the art to augment physical items in enterprise environments with embedded technology to build automated item identification and tracking systems. These systems can support different processes related, for instance, to supply chain management in intra- and/or inter-enterprise business scenarios. One emerging technology in this area is Radio Frequency Identification (RFID). RFID mainly enables to distinguish between tagged objects, such as pallets, boxes or single items, each storing its own (globally) unique identifier. In most of the cases, objects equipped with transponders, such as with RFID Tags, play a more passive than an active role during business process execution: They simple reveal their identity or other static data for a requesting entity, such as an RFID Reader. Information gained that way can be basically used as input for different business process tasks running on back-end systems. For example, processes monitoring and controlling the transportation of a given set of goods can be made more transparent and safe in this way. In this research project we move some small, but - at least for us - important steps forward. Our research activities focus on the development and the integrated application-driven usage of so-called "Collaborative Business Items" (short CoBIs) that utilize a wide spectrum of sensor networks technology. Since these Items are considered to be much "smarter" than items tagged with RFID transponders, they can play a more active role in business processes: The project's vision is to delegate well-defined parts of business logic functionality, i.e. process execution, from resource intensive backend systems to relatively low cost networked embedded systems that run "where the action is". These tiny systems utilize in our case sensor network technology that enables them to build-up collaborating "teams", in order to reach a certain result motivated by the needs of the supported business process. From the business perspective, the approach to handle situations locally can potentially lead to reduced processing and transactional costs, to improved response times in business- or even safety-critical situations, and also to enhanced quality of process results within a given operational environment. In addition to improvements on existing business processes, there is also a chance to identify new business cases and develop the corresponding processes and services based on the CoBIs technology. From the more technical point of view, flexible distributed process handling based on services that run on CoBIs nodes can help saving back-end systems' resources, such as CPU-time, memory, network bandwidth, etc., and can thus lead to enhanced reliability, responsiveness and scalability of the overall system. sub |
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