SCOntology: A Formal Approach toward a Unified and Integrated View of the Supply Chain

Abstract

This contribution points out the various challenges associated to Supply Chain Management (SCM). SCM involves coordinating and integrating material, information and money flows, both within and across several companies. The integration of these flows is perceived in quite distinct ways by different communities, raising some semantics-related problems. To assist organizations in achieving a unified view of the Supply Chain (SC), a new ontology, named SCOntology, is introduced in this chapter. SCOntology is a framework to formally describe a SC at various abstraction levels, by sharing a precise meaning of the information exchanged during communication among the many stakeholders involved in the SC. Moreover, SCOntology provides a foundation for the specification of information logistics processes and also sets the grounds for measuring and evaluating a SC by stating different metrics and performance-related concepts.