The MIDAS System: A Service Oriented Architecture for Automated Supply Chain Management

The MIDAS system that we have developed is an automated supply chain management system based on the Service Oriented Architecture and Web Services. MIDAS provides a loosely-coupled distributed environment that allows customers, manufacturers, and suppliers to cooperate over the Internet and World Wide Web. It aims to reduce inventory carrying costs and logistics administration costs, yielding a more efficient supply chain, by supporting just-in-time manufacturing. It eliminates, or substantially reduces, human intervention on both the customer/manufacturer side and the manufacturer/supplier side. It allows a manufacturer to select, dynamically from the MIDAS Registry, suppliers of components, based on the price, availability, and delivery time of those components. A manufacturer can use one of several strategies to aggregate customers' orders before it processes them and to accumulate suppliers' quotes before it decides on a particular supplier. The use of a Service Oriented Architecture, such as MIDAS, can substantially improve the efficiency of a supply chain.