iFAO: Facility Network Transformation Services for Specific Customer Oriented Service Industries

Facility Network Transformation (FNT) is a strategic approach to assess and optimize industrial facility networks for new site selection, demand forecasting, and performance evaluation in customer oriented service industries such as banking and retail. In practice, FNT requirements are often diverse, dynamic and industry specific. It is often difficult to implement a generic FNT service fully integrated with legacy systems. The heterogeneity of spatial information further calls for a loosely coupled architecture. An innovative spatial decision support system, iFAO (Intelligent Facility Network Analytics and Optimization), for FNT problems using Service Oriented Architecture principles was developed. In this paper, key FNT service patterns are identified and modeled to provide an industry independent solution, and an SOA-based framework for iFAO is proposed. An underlying data model design is elaborated which acts as a common language for experts from different domains to communicate and help speed up the solution development. A retail case is presented to illustrate how SOA based iFAO services are integrated to address real industrial problems, especially for quick decisions on business strategy in the competitive and ever-changing marketplace. [<i>Service Science</i>, ISSN 2164-3962 (print), ISSN 2164-3970 (online), was published by Services Science Global (SSG) from 2009 to 2011 as issues under ISBN 978-1-4276-2090-3.]