Research of Information System for Agile Virtual Enterprise Supported by Fourth Party Logistics

We present an information infrastructure in which Agile Virtual Enterprise (AVE) Supported by Fourth Party Logistics (4PL), named 4PL-AVE. At first, the difference between AVE and 4PL is introduced, and then 4PL-AVE model architecture is given that consists of three-dimensional cube of life-cycle dimension, the view model dimension and universal level dimension which complete describe the 4PL-AVE gradually for analysis, design and deployment. Secondly, the project of 4PL-AVE Information Integration is proposed using process integration, workflow composition and data integration. Thirdly, we discuss the technology line to build 4PL-AVE information framework based J2EE open source architecture. Fourthly, an application instance is introduced and the time of 4PL-AVE business process is greatly reduced. In the end, we point that solving 4PL-AVE performance problem use data warehouse and data mining technology, and RFID and cloud computing technology will be widely used in 4PL-AVE.