A Survey of Ontology-Based Frameworks for Sustainable Supply Chain Interoperability and Collaboration

Abstract

Accurate and meaningful sharing of knowledge across the supply chain enables effective and timely decision making, a key requirement for ensuring cost-effectiveness, availability, and quality of products and services. Effective elicitation, analysis, classification, and representation of domain knowledge are all essential activities for effective sharing of information. Ontology-based frameworks create a common formal representation of a particular domain that can be communicated, and understood by people and machine agents in addition to integrating different knowledge bases to connect heterogeneous engineering applications. Such frameworks have been exploited in the manufacturing domain as buyer-supplier discovery systems that can be used for quick matchmaking, intelligent connectivity, knowledge-driven collaboration, and possible establishment of stronger, sustainable, long-term, and strategic supply chains. A literature review has identified many frameworks with varying knowledge sharing capabilities that are highly determined by the underlying ontological formalism.