SECURE MULTI-PARTY COLLABORATION SYSTEMS IN SUPPLY CHAIN MANAGEMENT Shiping Chen, Chen Wang, Dongxi Liu CSIRO ICT Centre, Sydney, Australia {shiping.chen, chen.wang, dongxi.liu}@csiro.au
Gaurav Singh CSIRO CMIS, Melbourn, Australia
[email protected]
Keywords:
Security, Trust, Privacy, Multi-party, Collaboration, Supply Chain Management.
Abstract:
As business expertise becomes more specialized and focused, the business scopes and processes are becoming much larger and complicated. As a result, there are needs for multi-party business entities to collaborate with each other in order to complete a complicated business process in supply chains. In a supply chain, the participant can be collaborators, as well as competitors. As a result, some participants can be very concerned with the privacy of their. In this paper, we will use a real supply chain application to show the demand for secure multi-party collaboration systems.
1
INTRODUCTION
As business expertise becomes more specialized and focused, the business scopes and processes are becoming much larger and complicated. One of such complications comes from the fact that business processes have started to involve an increasing number of several independent decision making parties. As a result, there are needs for multi-party business entities to collaborate with each other in order to complete a complicated business process. For example, production of a bottle of wine involves collaboration of at least four independent parties, wineries, grape growers, grape harvesters and truck companies. Such multi-party collaborations can be observed in many other domains e.g. airline industry, bulk material supply chains, agriculture industry, entertainment industry etc. During a collaboration process, each participant is usually an independent business entity. Each of these entities has an individual goal which cannot be achieved without collaboration from other entities involved in the process. Therefore, the entities join in the collaboration in order to achieve a common goal which is beneficial to all the entities. To achieve this common goal, the entities need to provide, share and/or exchange business data. Depending on the nature of collaboration,
collaborators may have different trust relationship. For example, in some collaboration processes, the participant can be collaborators, as well as competitors. As a result, the participants would be very concerned with the privacy of their information like the names of clients and amount of goods to sell and/or buy. In this case, sometimes, it is acceptable for the collaborators to use a 3rd party, who is trusted by all the participants as a middleman (also called coordinator) to conduct the collaborative computation and/or manage the collaborative data. With this trust model, the collaborators need to define and agree on some security polices to specify ‘who can do what’ within the scope of the collaboration. The agreed policies are then deployed and enforced in the collaboration system. While this trust model and system architecture have been widely used in many current collaboration applications, participants’ privacy remains risky, because the coordinator can access all collaborative data and have full control over the collaborative computation. The issue also exists in the cloud computing paradigm, where an organisation outsources its IT systems. For some sensitive collaboration, the participants may not accept a middleman to coordinate the collaboration, unless there are some levels of technical guarantees that even the coordinator is unable to access the
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collaborative data. Therefore, there are demands for different secure multi-party collaboration technologies to enable a variety of collaborative datasharing and computations and preserve each party’s privacy. This paper will discuss data privacy as one of key security issues in supply chain collaborations. The motivation for this work is derived from our long-term engagements and experiences with Australian bulk material supply chains industry. We will use a real supply chain application to show the requirement for secure multi-party collaboration for supply chains.
2
COAL CHAIN APPLICATION
Mining of black coal is one of Australia's most important industries, creating significant employment in regional Australia, fuel for low-cost electricity generation and steel-making, and is a vital source of export revenue. Australia is the world's biggest coal exporter, and black coal is Australia's largest export, worth more than $A50 billion in 2008-09. Managing the coal supply chain requires the planning and coordination of train and ship movements, subject to a number of operational constraints. This task is critical as increasing coal export is limited by the capacity of the supply chain. This task also becomes very difficult as different sections of the supply chain are owned/operated/controlled by various independent parties. Including, x Mines or Producers: responsible for producing coal products x Above rail operators: responsible for managing trains to bring coal from mines to the terminal x Track operators: responsible for providing and maintaining rail track capacities.
x Port Operators: responsible for moving the coal from the terminal to ships arriving at various points in time In the case when there is no collaboration and all the planning is done at the individual party level this often results in:
x The inefficient planning and scheduling of coal through the Coal Chain; x Lack of coordinated planned maintenance activities; x Excessive levels of cancellations and therefore rework.
Hunter Valley Coal Chain (HVCC) is the World’s largest coal export operation (Gaurav Singh et al., 2010) as shown in Figure 1. It involves:
x 13 coal miners producing more than 80 different brands of coal from 27 load points; x 3 train operators running 29 trains/15,000 trips per year along 350 km tracks owned/operated by 2 track owners/operators; x 3 coal port terminals loading 1000 vessels per year.
To make the complicated coal supply chain run smoothly and efficiently, in 2003 a 3rd - party independent coordinator (Hunter Valley Coal Chain Coordinator - HVCCC) was established to coordinate the collaborative business activities at multiple levels (weekly scheduling, monthly contracts management, and long-term infrastructure planning). With a mix of Federal, State and privately owned organisations operating individual components of the Coal Chain, the HVCCC provides a single point of coordination for all planning decisions. As HVCCC has proven that coal chain runs more efficiently with a coordinator, there are obvious privacy-concerns about participants’ proprietary business information (delivery request,
Figure 1: Hunter Valley Coal Chain -- Transport Logistics Network (Source: AJCC 2010).
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