Subject-oriented design of smart hyper-connected logistics systems

Digitization increasingly pervades our everyday life. Recent trends like the Internet of Things, Cyber-Physical Systems, Industry 4.0 or the Physical Internet aim to apply Information and Communication Technology in order to improve organizational performance and ensure competitive advantage. These attempts aim to further integrate the physical and digital world in order to enable communication and collaboration among different organizational actors (people, machines, and even things) and among diverse organizations in real-time. In the logistics domain the increasing digitization is reflected in the Physical Internet initiative. This paper investigates which role S-BPM could play in the Physical Internet. Thereby, previous S-BPM research in the context of Industry 4.0 is discussed with respect to its applicability for designing and implementing aspects of the Physical Internet. Furthermore, an extended S-BPM modeling approach is presented and applied in an application example for smart parcel distribution. Finally, an implementation strategy targeting S-BPM implementations in the Physical Internet is sketched.