Towards a Supply Chain Ontology of Information Logistics within Process Industry Environments

Process industries are nowadays involved in extended supply chains (ESC), which leave aside the traditional company-centric view of the supply chain (SC). The CAPE community has done many contributions in this domain, mainly proposing mathematical models to tackle the optimal infrastructure design of the SC and to address the SC planning and scheduling problems. Most approaches assume that the required data is always available. However, in many cases, this statement is not true: companies belonging to the same SC use different contents and formats for a given information entity to be shared. Even worst, they may have distinct views of a certain business process in which they participate. Therefore, there is a need for specific contributions focusing on the design of information logistics (IL) processes; processes that must be able to feed the mathematical models with proper data coming from the ESC. The SC Council (http://www.supply-chain.org/) presented a general framework for the SC management, named SCOR (Supply Chain Operations Reference Model). It is a business process reference model that provides a standard description of SC planning and operational activities. Thus, these tasks could be described and communicated, providing the basis for SC improvement. However, SCOR has some limitations and it is necessary to extend it in order to obtain a system of consistent concepts that could be used by all the actors and components of an ESC. In order to tackle the consistency problem, this contribution proposes the design of an ontology that provides the foundations for the specification of IL processes in ESCs associated to process industries. The proposed ontology tries to formalize and extend the SCOR model concepts in order to overcome their limitations. This ontology is a first step towards achieving a standard description of SC design and management processes.