Ontologies for supply chain management
Ali Ahmad · 2003
Supply chain management aims to maximize the value generated for the various supply chain partners. The supply chain consists of all the stages involved directly or indirectly in fulfilling a customer request. It includes suppliers, manufacturers, warehouses, selling centers, and customers. The purpose of this research is to construct a general-purpose ontology for supply chain management. Ontologies are semantic primitives that specify a shared domain of knowledge. The developed ontologies will facilitate knowledge sharing among the various supply chain stakeholders, and they can be used for constructing more specialized ontologies to include supply chain specification, supply chain modeling, and supply chain decision making. The ontologies are developed using a waterfall approach, which involves acquiring knowledge pertaining to supply chain management, extracting the domain concepts, defining the relationships among the various concepts and the various concepts' details, and building the ontology on Protege 2000, the selected ontology development tool. The waterfall model was enhanced through the use of feedback loops to show the iterative nature of ontology development. The resulting supply chain management ontology describes the various supply chain stages, decisions, flows, and drivers. It is extended to include forecasting, costing, and replenishment policies. It maps the relationships among the various concepts and serves as a backbone for more specialized ontologies.