Supply Chain Standardization- An Ontological Approach

Revision with unchanged content. Manufacturing Market is a market in which manufacturing process capacity is the object of trade. Due to the pooling effect of markets, market-derived supply chains are more responsive to fluctuations in supply and demand. Although Manufacturing Market can be built physically as a spot market, its benefits can be better realized in a web-based framework. We refer to the web-based version of Manufacturing Market as Digital Manufacturing Market (DMM). Despite its various benefits, DMM poses several challenges including communication among different actors of the market. A lack of universally accepted and implemented information exchange standards in manufacturing domain is the major impediment to the materialization of DMM. In this work, the motivations behind adopting DMM as a medium for deployment and operation of supply chains are discussed. Also, various challenges of building a virtual market for manufacturing service are introduced and the standardization problem, in particular, is addressed through an ontological approach. To demonstrate how the proposed ontology facilitates supply chain deployment, a multi-agent system is developed in which autonomous machine agents proactively participate in the configuration process. This book is mainly directed towards researchers in the areas of distributed design and manufacturing as well as engineering knowledge management.