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Journal of Electrical Systems and Information Technology 3 (2016) 127–140

Business integration unit (BIU) adapter for industrial global value

chain on the web
Adel Ghannam ∗
MSA University, Faculty of Management Sciences, MIS Department, Cairo, Egypt
Received 4 January 2016; accepted 20 March 2016
Available online 24 March 2016

Abstract
Today’s manufacturing enterprises rarely live in isolation. They need to be connected in order to create products from which
a group of enterprises, called global-value-chain (GVC), can derive value. Service-oriented architecture (SOA) and event-driven
architecture (EDA) are two different paradigms that address complex integration challenges. Enterprise service bus (ESB) allows
for the implementation of both the SOA and the EDA concepts. This paper addresses the development of an enterprise service bus
(ESB) to grant the operation of GVC. A proposed business-integrator-unit (BIU) is designed to be plugged in each enterprise system.
The BIU contains a “business collaboration map configurator” that allows real time allocation of roles to members’ enterprises.
© 2016 Electronics Research Institute (ERI). Production and hosting by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC
BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).

Keywords: Global value chain; GVC; Process integration; Interoperability; UML model; ESB

1. Introduction

In this introductory section, we explore the reasons for the research program, important definitions and the scope
of the problem addressed.

1.1. Business rationale for the research

In this section we explore the business reasons for the research. The WTO (2013) quotes in a recent report
“In the last three to four decades, government and business have been part of a far-reaching economic transfor-
mation, made possible by remarkable advances in information, communication and transport technologies. The
proliferation of internationally joined-up production arrangements – that is, global supply chains – has changed
our economic and political landscape in fundamental ways.”

∗ Tel.: +20 1223109156.

E-mail address: mghanam@msa.eun.eg
Peer review under the responsibility of Electronics Research Institute (ERI).

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jesit.2016.03.001
2314-7172/© 2016 Electronics Research Institute (ERI). Production and hosting by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC
BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).
128 A. Ghannam / Journal of Electrical Systems and Information Technology 3 (2016) 127–140

Fig. 1. Value web: collection of firms acting together in an industrial value chain coordinated by networks.

Advances in technology and an enabling policy environment have allowed businesses to internationalize their
operations across multiple locations in order to increase efficiency, lower costs and speed up production.
For their part, governments recognize that participating in global value chains will bring value and opportunities to
their workers and economies; they have thus sought to foster friendly policy frameworks.
On the other hand, the UNIDO and The OECD promote that main growth drive for economy is becoming more
specialized in knowledge-intensive, high value-added activities. Specialization in more traditional cost-based industries
and activities is no longer a viable option for most firms. A cluster approach will help the members enterprises
moving beyond their individual capacities, organizing themselves in dynamic production networks, developing strategic
relationships with other firms and institutions to improve their competitive advantages based on economies of scale,
innovation and learning.
The above mentioned international drives leads to more development in the Global value chain GVC. GVC is the
evolution of SCM; “the collaboration between partners and the transportation”. It shifts the focus from production alone
to the whole range of activities, see Porters value chain (Porter, 1985), from design to marketing, and it problematizes
the question of governance – how chains are organized and managed.

1.2. GVC definition

The GVC is a grouping of business organizations which sell goods and services on the market or as the whole
multitude of interactions between suppliers, manufacturers, distributors and customers. Due to the fact that, as a result
of the interactions between suppliers, manufacturers, distributors and customers we add value to the material objects,
Fig. 1. It is now an accepted fact that in the twenty first century, competition will be between value-chains, which
efficiently and effectively integrate their competencies and resources to compete in the global market. We do not have,
any more, the model of closed-protected local market.
The idea of the value chain is based on the process view of organizations, the idea of seeing a manufacturing (or
service) organization as a system, made up of subsystems each with inputs, transformation processes and outputs.
Inputs, transformation processes, and outputs involve the acquisition and consumption of resources – money, labor,
materials, equipment, buildings, land, administration and management. How value chain activities are carried out
determines costs and affects profits.
The value chain concept is well known in operation management science. According to Porter (1985), Fig. 2. The
subsystems can be classified generally as either primary or support activities that all businesses must undertake in some
form.
 A. Ghannam / Journal of Electrical Systems and Information Technology 3 (2016) 127–140 129

Fig. 2. Porter’s value chain of manufacturing.

The primary subsystems are:

1. Inbound logistics – involve relationships with suppliers and include all the activities required to receive, store, and
disseminate inputs.
2. Operations – are all the activities required to transform inputs into outputs (products and services).
3. Outbound logistics – include all the activities required to collect, store, and distribute the output.
4. Marketing and sales – activities inform buyers about products and services, induce buyers to purchase them, and
facilitate their purchase.
5. Service – includes all the activities required to keep the product or service working effectively for the buyer after
it is sold and delivered.

The support subsystems are:

1. Procurement – is the acquisition of inputs, or resources, for the firm.

2. Human resource management – consists of all activities involved in recruiting, hiring, training, developing,
compensating and (if necessary) dismissing or laying off personnel.
3. Technological development – pertains to the equipment, hardware, software, procedures and technical knowledge
brought to bear in the firm’s transformation of inputs into outputs.
4. Infrastructure – serves the company’s needs and ties its various parts together, it consists of functions or departments
such as accounting, legal, finance, planning, public affairs, government relations, quality assurance and general
management.

1.3. The research problem

In this paper, we address the operations subsystems interoperability in the design of a GVC system addressing
how ICT can contribute reducing manufacturing order response time. Delays may be because of Information delays
and distortion between partners in the value chain, due to weakness of inter-process integration between members.
Inter-process integration will allow coordinated flow of activities, as well as speed up correcting unexpected defects.
The current models of production are a single minded focus on activities. These activities form individual nodes in
a linear sequence of steps that we refer to as the supply chain, Fig. 3. The traditional supply chain suggests a sequence
of information flow and material movement that is well-ordered and sequential.
Today, information and material no longer flow in simple linear fashion from supplier to customer. The flow of
information resembles a complex web of exchanges rather than a chain (see Fig. 3).
Seamless material flows are achieved by replacing the notion of a sequential-linear chain of information exchange
with a set of concurrent exchange that span the members of the GVC on the web. For example, shipment of components
from suppliers around the world can be arranged for concurrent delivery to manufacturers, to meet customer date.
130 A. Ghannam / Journal of Electrical Systems and Information Technology 3 (2016) 127–140

Fig. 3. The difference between traditional SCM and GVC (Greis and Kasarda, 1997).

Fig. 4. The request/reply mechanism in a SOA.

Moreover, innovative design can be done concurrently between members of the GVC. This concurrency can be
achieved by integrating the members processes over the Web. The systems of members should communicate directly
without human intervention, to prevent delays resulting from multiple human lateness.

2. Methods and technology

2.1. Needed background of collaborative computing on the internet

Forming a GVC on the web requires coordinating of the business process to work together in a collaborative
environment. This allows concurrent execution of activities.
The overall architecture of the GVC network will be based on the Service-Oriented-Architecture SOA. SOA
(Georgakopoulos and Papazoglou, 2009; Maréchaux, 2006) is based on a conventional request/reply mechanism, as
seen in Fig. 4. A service consumer invokes a service provider through the network and has to wait until the completion
of the operation on the provider side.
SOA is an architectural pattern that involves decomposing applications into managed networks of inter-operating
services. Those services could be implemented in a variety of technologies.
SOAs, the web services description language (WSDL) and web services solutions (Georgakopoulos and Papazoglou,
2009; ws-i; Special issue Web, 2007; Clark, 2015) support two key roles: a service requester (client) and a service
provider, which communicate via service requests. Table 1 shows the fundamental SOA characteristics.

Table 1
Fundamental SOA characteristics.
Capability Description
Loosely coupled interactions Services are invoked independently of their technology and location
Consumer-based trigger The flow of control is initiated by the client (the service consumer)
 A. Ghannam / Journal of Electrical Systems and Information Technology 3 (2016) 127–140 131

Table 2
Fundamental EDA characteristics.
Capability Description
Decoupled interactions Event publishers are not aware of the existence of event subscribers
Many-to-many communications Publish/subscribe messaging where one specific event can impact many subscribers
Event-based trigger Flow of control that is determined by the recipient, based on an event posted
Asynchronous Supports asynchronous operations through event messaging

• Service requests are messages formatted according to the Simple Object Access Protocol (the World Wide Web
Consortium (W3C)) SOAP (Georgakopoulos and Papazoglou, 2009). SOAP entails a light-weight protocol allowing
remote procedure Call RPC-like calls over the Internet using a variety of transport protocols. In principle, SOAP
provides a distributed processing model that assumes an SOAP message originates at an initial SOAP sender and
is sent to an ultimate SOAP receiver. The SOAP specification establishes a standard message format that consists
of an XML document capable of hosting RPC and document-centric data. This facilitates synchronous (request
and response) as well as asynchronous (process-driven) data exchange models. The SOAP request is received by a
runtime service (an SOAP “listener”) that accepts the SOAP message, extracts the XML message body, and delegates
the request to the actual function or business process within an enterprise. After processing the request, the provider
typically sends a response to the client in the form of an SOAP envelope carrying an XML message.
• The web services description language (WSDL) is a W3C specification providing the foremost language for the
description of Web service definitions. Web Services need to be defined in a consistent manner so that they can be
discovered by and interfaced with other services and applications. A WSDL service description describes the point
of contact for a service, also known as the service endpoint or just endpoint. It establishes the physical location of
the service and provides a formal definition of the endpoint interface so that programs wishing to communicate with
the service know exactly how to structure the required request messages. WSDL is often used in combination with
SOAP and an XML Schema to provide web services over the Internet. A client program connecting to a Web service
can read the WSDL file to determine what operations are available on the server. Any special datatypes used are
embedded in the WSDL file in the form of XML Schema. The client can then use SOAP to actually call one of the
operations listed in the WSDL file using for example XML over HTTP.
• In the enterprise context, business events (e.g., a customer order, the arrival of a shipment at a loading dock, or the
payment of a bill) may affect the normal course of a business process at any point in time. This implies that business
processes cannot be designed a priori, assuming that events follow predetermined patterns, but must be defined
more dynamically to permit process flows to be driven by asynchronous events. Event-driven architecture (EDA)
(Georgakopoulos and Papazoglou, 2009; Maréchaux, 2006) defines a methodology for designing and implementing
applications and systems in which events transmit between decoupled software components and services. Basic
characteristics of the EDA are shown in Table 2.

EDA does not replace, but rather, complements the SOA. While SOA is generally a better fit for a request/response
exchange, EDA introduces long-running asynchronous process capabilities. Moreover, an EDA node posts events and
does not depend on the availability of a published service. It is really decoupled from the other nodes. EDA uses
messaging to communicate among two or more application processes. The communication is initiated by an “event”.
This trigger typically corresponds to some business occurrence. Any subscribers to that event are then notified and
thus activated, as shown in Fig. 5.
The technologies of SOA, EDA and web services are combined to implement the integration media, called enterprise
service bus (ESB), Fig. 5. The ESB provides messaging, routing and transformation capabilities that enable services to
be easily integrated at development time or runtime. The ESB acts as an intermediary layer to enable communication
between different application processes. A service deployed onto an enterprise service bus can be triggered by a
consumer or an event. It supports synchronous and asynchronous, facilitating interactions between one or many
stakeholders (one-to-one or many-to-many communications). So the ESB provides all the capabilities of both SOA and
EDA paradigms (see Tables 1 and 2). In our model the ESB is implemented on the Internet to allow loosely coupled
GVC.
132 A. Ghannam / Journal of Electrical Systems and Information Technology 3 (2016) 127–140

Fig. 5. The publish/subscribe mechanism in an event-driven architecture.

Inter-process coordination requires real-time monitoring of the goods movement on the shop-floor to achieve
real-time coordination. Zhang et al. (2012) propose an RFID-enabled real-time manufacturing information track-
ing infrastructure to address the real-time manufacturing data capturing and manufacturing information processing
methods, see Fig. 6. His work addresses the following key design issues:

(1) How to establish an overall real-time manufacturing information tracking infrastructure to support optimal plan
and management?
(2) Which types of manufacturing information should be tracked and how to easily and effectively deploy Auto-ID
devices such as RFID readers and tags for capturing the manufacturing data during production stage?
(3) How to process the distributed real-time manufacturing information to provide useful and meaningful manufac-
turing information for real-time decision?

Fig. 6. The Zhang architecture.

 A. Ghannam / Journal of Electrical Systems and Information Technology 3 (2016) 127–140 133

Fig. 7. The e-manufacturing architecture (Ghannam et al., 2015).

Fig. 6 shows four core components are involved in this infrastructure:

1. RFID-enabled manufacturing data capturing: This component is responsible for capturing the real-time manufac-
turing Information occurred at different manufacturing resources.
2. Information management center: Information management center is mainly for the unified data management of the
whole shop floor, and provide facilities for the tracking system to communicate with enterprise servers.
3. Real-time manufacturing information processing model: The real-time manufacturing data captured by RFID
devices is unorderly and meaningless for enterprises. Although these data record the real status of manufactur-
ing execution, they still need to be processed to provide meaningful management information such as overall
manufacturing cost, manufacturing progress, WIP inventory etc.
4. Multi-view based real-time manufacturing information Explorers: Multi-view based real-time manufacturing explor-
ers for enterprises during manufacturing execution are provided for target users to visualize real-time manufacturing
information so as to support their appropriate manufacturing operations and facilitate adaptive decision making.

The architecture of Zhang is consistent with the ISA standards. Based on ISA and Zhang work an applied R&D work
has been implement to introduce the RFID visibility into the WIP and inventory control in the Egyptian manufacturing
sector (Ghannam et al., 2015). In this applied R&D work the architecture adopted is given in Fig. 7, and is referred to as
e-manufacturing. The objective was developing a prototype that manages real-time interaction of the shop-floor-control
(SFC) system with back end ERP systems to correct delays on the shop floor, improving real-time operation, reducing
cost, and allow real-time visibility, through the intelligent usage of the RFID.
Fig. 7 shows the following layers:

• The bottom layer is the physical RFID network which contains: RFID tags, antennas, readers, touch screens, and
the SFC shop floor communication network
• The second layer upward is the network control middleware which is responsible for:
1. Identification of the tags IDs
2. Read/write the tags
3. Manage the data transfer between the data point and the reader
4. Manage the transfer between the readers network and the associated antennas, to the SFC system
5. Manage the RF technology problems on the shop floor
• The SFC application layer is executing the SFC processes using Java-Eclipse environment. It provides the following
applications services:
134 A. Ghannam / Journal of Electrical Systems and Information Technology 3 (2016) 127–140

The SFC is divided into six service states:

1. The start of day service, to get the to-day dispatch list from the ERP system (detailed list of orders)
2. The build ticket tags service, to create build ticket tags for today orders
3. The assign foreman to zones (data point areas), to write the assigned data point address in the foremen personal
tags.
4. The WIP service to monitor the build tags movement
5. The finished product service to create the product tag
6. The feedback service to transfer, to the ERP, the accomplished items of the get the-to-day dispatch list
The SFC maintenance services:
1. get preventive/corrective maintenance records, from ERP, for a whole week from today
2. write maintenance order records in the SFC data base
3. write maintenance order numbers in the addressed maintenance tags using the fixed readers/antennas network
4. maintenance operator verify the order through wireless hand held RFID reader and perform the work
5. read all maintenance tags
6. Transfer closed maintenance records, of today, to the central ERP system in any place of the world
7. Request a corrective maintenance
The SFC expensive tools control services are
1. Read the operators RFID tag in range of the expensive tool store gate, using fixed readers network
2. Display operator personal attributes, obtained from his tag, on the touch screen of expensive tool store gate
3. Write the tool ID to foreman personal tag in range using Fixed readers network
4. On return of the tool, erase the tool ID from the operator tag and keep a historical record in the SFC DB
• The upper XML web interface, Configurable Integration with production planning system (ERP)-based on XML
technology and the web services description language

3. The model logical design represented in UML

The logical design translates the requirements into a system model that depicts only the conceptual requirements
and not any possible technical design or implementation of those requirements. Common synonyms include conceptual
design and essential design. In IT system design, this step is mandatory to specify what tasks the system is doing,
then it is followed by the physical design which answer How the tasks are accomplished.
In this paper model, we focus on the coordination of the manufacturing processes of the members in a GVC network.
Conceptually, the form of process integration that is of most interest within a SOA is that involving Actions as defined
below, Fig. 8, and their interaction across ownership we call this joint action. In Fig. 8, one line of activity (on the left)
can be completed through Action3 without crossing any ownership boundary but in case of GVC the alternative path,
starting Action4, can only be completed as a result of joint action across an ownership boundary using collaborative
computing on the internet.
In this section, the coordination of actions/or/processes is designed using the UML class and sequence diagram. A
high level conceptual view is given in Fig. 9.
Traditionally integration between applications was through electronic-data-interchange EDI. In fact, legacy EDI
does not meet today’s requirements in three key areas: multiplicity of standards, increased need to automate the overall
business process rather than just the exchange of documents, and demand for real-time information exchange. We need
Interoperability of the business applications over the web, irrespective of the location. The overall conceptual view of
the proposed GVC network model should satisfy the view given in Fig. 9.
We have two approaches. The traditional one known as the information hub (Lee and Whang, 2001) given in Fig. 10.
The information hub is a node in the data network where multiple organizations interact in to build the IT infrastructure.
It has the capabilities of data storage, information processing, and push/pull publishing. The overall network forms a
hub-and-spoke system with the participants’ internal information systems (i.e., ERP or other enterprise systems) being
the spokes.
Due to the radically different interaction styles between applications, they were typically not connected in real-time.
More typically, an inbound adapter draws data from a system into a file or message based store, then an integration flow
manipulates the data and passes it on to the target systems. Having a single Hub makes system with this architecture easy
to manage but scalability takes a hit. At some point of time as number of messages increase, scalability gets dependent
 A. Ghannam / Journal of Electrical Systems and Information Technology 3 (2016) 127–140 135

Fig. 8. Activity involving actions across an ownership boundary.

Enterprise-1 Enterprise-N

ERP ERP

The Internet

SFC-1 SFC-N

Fig. 9. Overall conceptual view.

Fig. 10. The information hub.

on hardware. Having a bigger server box to scale application has never been an ideal solution so to overcome this
limitation.
To successfully build and deploy a distributed Service-oriented architecture, the following primary aspects need to
be addressed:

(a) Service enablement: each discrete application is exposed as a service.

136 A. Ghannam / Journal of Electrical Systems and Information Technology 3 (2016) 127–140

Enterprise-1 Enterprise-N

ERP ERP

ERP ERP
Adapter The ESB Adapter
boundary
The Internet

SFC SFC
Adapter Adapter

SFC-1 SFC-N

Fig. 11. The ESB conceptual architecture.

(b) Service orchestration: distributed services are configured and orchestrated in clearly specified processes.
(c) Services: must be monitored, and their invocations and selection may need to be configured to better meet application
specific goals.

The new alternative for the hub-and spoke is the enterprise service bus ESB (Chappell, 2004), Fig. 11. An ESB
is the next generation of integration middleware, capable of being applied in a broad range of integration projects.
Due to its standards-based platform it enables all kind of communication between service consumer and service
providers. The ESB orchestrates process flows, finds the right routing paths of messages and transforms messages
into an understandable language. This kind of logic is centralized within the adapter for each enterprise, and therefore
consuming services or providing services could be completely independent of each other. New service consumers or
service providers could be attached to the ESB, without blocking existing flows.
Chappell (2004) has described the following key characteristics of an ESB:

• Pervasiveness; an ESB is capable of spanning the GVC. Service consumers or service providers can plug into the
ESB as needed, and are capable of having visibility and of sharing data with any other applications or services that
are plugged into the ESB.
• Process flow; the process flow capabilities of an ESB range from simple sequences of steps to sophisticated business
process orchestration and exists within a network or coexists in a larger integration network. The process flows in
an ESB can also perform intelligent routing of messages based on content.
• XML as the integration data type; despite that an ESB can route data in any form of packaging, the XML data type
is an ideal foundation for representing data as it flows between applications.
• Real-time throughput and insight; an ESB provides the underpinnings to enable real-time insight into live business
data. All received messages are directly routed, based on the routing rules, and an ESB within an event driven
architecture enables real-time integration of applications.

The key difference between hub/spoke and bus topology is that for the bus architecture, the integration engine that
performs message transformation and routing is distributed in the application adapters and bus architecture requires
an application adapter to run on the same platform as the original applications.
The structure of the adapter is given in Fig. 12. In this research we call it business integration unit (BIU). It has five
components.
The UML logical design is given in terms of the class diagram (Fig. 13) and the sequence diagram (Fig. 14).
 A. Ghannam / Journal of Electrical Systems and Information Technology 3 (2016) 127–140 137

Business collaborator map

SOAP Message handler configurator

Business Event handler (the EDA func on)

WSDL end point

Business applica ons

SFC/or/ ERP

Fig. 12. The BIU.

-End1 1

SOAP message handler

collaborator map
-SOAP message attributes -End2
-End3 -product code
+get member product code() -BOM name
+get BOM name() : collaborator map
1..* +check product name()
+inform client product finished ()
1 +check BOM name ()

1..* -End5

0..1 -End4

Event handler
-event handler state : Boolean
+generate member comit signal()

1 -End9
1 -End6

client ERP SFC service provider

-partner name -product WIP status
-BOM name +get product WIP status()
-product name +commit start manufacturing()
+repeat with other members ()

1..* -End10 -End12 0..1

WSDL end point

-End11
-operations available
-parameters needed
+check operation () 1
+do the service ()

Fig. 13. The UML class diagram.

1. The WSDL is the service end point for the ERP or the SFC. The WSDL component contains all of the information
necessary for a client to invoke the methods of a web service:
• The data types used as operation parameters or return values
• The individual operation names
• The protocols and message formats allowed for each operation
• The URIs used to access the web service
2. The EDA; It delimits the start and finish of operations and sequence.
3. The business collaboration map configurator; It is the access control lists. It identifies the role of each member
in the GVC manufacturing. Roles are distributed according to the end-product structure, known in manufacturing
138 A. Ghannam / Journal of Electrical Systems and Information Technology 3 (2016) 127–140

Fig. 14. The UML-sequence diagram of the BIU.

as the bill-of-material BOM, example is shown in Fig. 15. The configurator stores the roles of the partners in the
product BOM. The configurator is interrogated by the SOAP XML content. In this example, the end product is
manufactured from two components, each one is further manufactured from other products. Manufacturing of the
components is allocated to partners 1 and 2. Configuration messages are issued by the end-product owner at the
beginning of a collaboration cycle.

Fig. 15. Example of roles allocation according to the real time BOM.
 A. Ghannam / Journal of Electrical Systems and Information Technology 3 (2016) 127–140 139

4. In principle, SOAP message handler provides a distributed processing model that assumes an SOAP message
originates at an initial SOAP sender and is sent to an ultimate SOAP receiver. The SOAP specification establishes
a standard message format that consists of an XML document capable of hosting remote-procedures-call (RPC)
and document-centric data. After processing the request, the provider typically sends a response to the client in the
form of an SOAP envelope carrying an XML message. The SOAP message handler has two main operations, see
the class diagram Fig. 13, namely:
(1) Get The BOM name
(2) Get the product code in the BOM

4. Conclusion and future work

Today’s enterprises are operating in a networked business environment. In this research we address the development
of ESB to grant the operation of GVC manufacturing operations, using the RFID, SOA, web services and XML
technologies. The ESB is discussed with respect to the hub-and-spoke integrated architecture. It is shown that the
ESB provides real loose coupling between enterprises allowing them to communicate despite their differences. The
ESB model developed is using a proposed business-integrator-unit (BIU) plugged in each enterprise system. The BIU
contains a “business collaboration map configurator” that allows real time allocation of roles to members’ enterprises
in the manufacturing of a product. Real-time allocations and the technologies used (ESB, RFID, SOA, web services,
XML) grant the implementation of the GVC in manufacturing satisfying the basic feature of the GVC, namely:

• Pervasiveness; an ESB is capable of spanning the GVC and beyond. Service consumers or service providers can
plug into the ESB as needed, using the BIU, and are capable of having visibility and of sharing data with any other
applications or services that are plugged into the ESB.
• Process flow; the process flow capabilities of an ESB range from simple sequences of steps to sophisticated business
process orchestration and exists within a network or coexists in a larger integration network.

The UML design of the system model is given in terms of the class and the sequence diagrams.
The next steps of this research program are:

1. The theory of constraints (TOC) uses a system perspective to analyze and understand the entire system, not just parts
of the system. This makes it possible to identify elements of the system that constrain, or limit, the output of the
system. By identifying such constraints, it is possible to find ways to alleviate these constraints to improve overall
system performance. The TOC has been applied in manufacturing planning of a single firm using two techniques.
Our purpose is extending the techniques on the group firms of the GVC with BIUs. The two techniques are:
(a) The Drum Buffer Rope Methodology (DBR) scheduling methodology is managed through the use of time buffers.
The drum is the system schedule or the pace at which the constraint works. Rope provides communication
between critical control points to ensure their synchronization. Buffer is strategically placed inventory to
protect the system’s output from the variations that occur in the system. The DBR methodology synchronizes
resources and material utilization in an organization. We need to apply the same concept on the given ESB
model in this paper to relax the constraints on the GVC performance
(b) The CONWIP methodology (CONstant Work IN Process) is a pull manufacturing planning and control system.
It possesses the benefits of the widely used Japanese pull (instead of push planning) Kanban system. We need
to apply the same concept on the given model in this paper to relax the constraints on the GVC performance
2. Simulate the resulting manufacturing ESB to evaluate the impact of key factors affecting the delivery time
3. Realize a real life prototype for the manufacturing ESB
4. Extend the work to include all the processes of the reference value chain model and investigate the use of agents
technology.
140 A. Ghannam / Journal of Electrical Systems and Information Technology 3 (2016) 127–140

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