A reference ontology to support the simultaneous design of a product and its optimized supply chain

摘要

To realize a simultaneous design of a product and its optimized supply chain, effective integration among design collaborators is a must. With the emergence of ontologies as a new modeling paradigm in industry during the last decade, efficient integration and semantic interoperability among all the inter-actors of the extended enterprise have become attainable. In fact, in addition to their great expressiveness, ontologies can afford many reasoning capabilities. In this paper, a reference ontology, general enough to represent both the product and supply chain data and specific enough to support the decision making process in the simultaneous design phase, has been proposed and implemented. In addition, we have exploited its potentialities through the proposition of a new integrating approach based on the dynamic interaction between ontology and mathematical models of optimization, in order to support interoperability and the optimization process within the simultaneous design of the product and its related supply chain.