Architecture of the Pharmaceutical Supply Chain Management System based on Internet of Things
Guomei Liu, Zhengge Li -, Shukui Bo · INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL ON Advances in Information Sciences and Service Sciences · 2013
Pharmaceutical products are a kind of perishable products. They will lose potency over time, especially if exposed to heat. And their quality is related to human health and life safety. The Pharmaceutical products should be kept at the correct temperature during the process of the supply chain, and it is necessary to carry out monitoring and tracking to the whole process. Focusing on this problem, architecture of the pharmaceutical supply chain management system based on Internet of things is proposed in this paper. Firstly, current situation of pharmaceutical supply chain management and features of Internet of things are analyzed. Secondly, architecture of the pharmaceutical supply chain management system based on Internet of things technology is proposed. The general framework of the architecture is given. The most important modules of the architecture including production management solution, logistics architecture, and retail in the system are designed respectively and the related structure graphs are presented. Thirdly, workflow of the system is described in detail. Finally, the advantages of the pharmaceutical supply chain management based on Internet of things are summarized. The pharmaceutical supply chain management system based on the architecture proposed in this paper can make the pharmaceutical products in good condition all the time, and it makes monitoring and tracking to the pharmaceutical products get much easier. It can greatly improve the management efficiency and international competitiveness of the pharmaceutical industries.