A Matchmaking Methodology for Supply Chain Deployment in Distributed Manufacturing Environments

Abstract

In modern manufacturing era, supply chains are increasingly becoming global and agile. To build agile global supply chains, companies first need to have access to a large supply base and secondly need an efficient mechanism for cost-effective and rapid location, evaluation, and selection of suppliers. This work introduces a matchmaking algorithm for connecting buyers and sellers of manufacturing services based on their semantic similarities in terms of manufacturing capabilities. The proposed matchmaking algorithm operates over Manufacturing Service Description Language (MSDL), an ontology for formal representation of manufacturing services. Since MSDL descriptions can be represented as directed labeled trees, a tree matching approach is implemented in this work.