A Case Study of Decision Support System and Warehouse Management System Integration

Abstract

A warehouse is an indispensable part of the logistics. A warehouse management system (WMS) is designed to improve efficiency in warehouses to increase their throughput and potential. The rise of IoT and its commercialization enabled ‘smart things' to be widely adopted by hobbyists and companies. Cheap sensors and smart devices triggered better automation opportunities. Many devices and sensors that are being deployed in the industry and warehousing are affected by this trend. A well-designed WMS is needed to connect devices and humans in a heterogenous warehouse environment. This chapter introduces a prototype of a WMS powered by a decision support system (DSS) based on real-life requirements. In order to have fast, reliable, and efficient decision making in warehousing, the importance of employing DSS in the WMS is emphasized. Warehouse-related IoT technology is briefly introduced, and its security considerations are discussed thoroughly. The main contribution of this chapter is to show how warehouse operations can be modeled in business process model notation and executed in a DSS.