A survey on supply chain ontologies

Abstract

Nowadays, the business area cannot be sustainable and efficient without the presence of the Supply Chain. However, Supply Chain Management is by no means an easy task. Experts, in their effort to achieve the most efficient Supply Chain Management, have turned their attention to the management of knowledge related to supply chains. Thus, they model the concepts and the semantic relationships between them in Supply Chain Networks and create conceptual models and ontologies. In this paper, a survey of the existing ontologies in this field is carried out, with the aim of creating a new ontology of the Supply Chain that will unify its structural elements and lead to the integration of all supply systems. For this purpose, 22 ontological models from different supply systems, from over 90 sources, have been collected, briefly presented and commented on. These models, although being an intersection in the effort to model business operations and delineate a good basis for businesses to engage in Logistics processes, they lack an adequate formulation of appropriate semantics and terminology to describe all the different functions of the Supply Chain. Consequently, this lack inevitably leads to incompatible interpretations and uses of the knowledge that results from intercompany transactions.