ZigBee Architecture for Disaster Relief Supply Chain Visibility and Supply Chain Coordination
Cameron Chi Sum Taylor, Tiru S. Arthanari · Journal of the Association for Information Systems · 2018
Supply chain visibility is essential to supply chain coordination in disaster relief humanitarian logistics but are in short supply. To enable visibility and coordination we designed a generic system architecture using autonomous peer-to-peer (P2P) mesh networks, with an analytics module that delivers partial visibility to improve coordination. From this architecture, a specific implementation was provided as a proof-of-concept, using ZigBee protocol (IEEE 802.15.4) as the wireless communications standard, Mosquitto as the message broker, and MySQL as the database. We explain how our prototype enables a ‘low cost’ Internet of Things (IoT) for disaster relief for sharing logistics information. We detail how different wireless communications standards (e.g. Wi-Fi, 2G, 3G, and 4G) can be integrated into prototypes for multi-standard support.