A Knowledge- and Workflow-Based System for Supporting Order Fulfillment Process in the Build-to-Order Supply Chains

A web-based system for order fulfillment provides a software environment for successfully implementing the build-to-order supply chain (BOSC) strategy. However, current efforts in this domain are not adequate to support automatic reasoning of knowledge-intensive activities within order processing processes and supervision and flexible responsiveness of the entire workflows. Based on the application scenario from a conveyer BOSC, this paper proposes an approach to developing an order management system called OMS-KW enhanced by the Semantic Web and workflow technologies. A multiontology-based approach is presented to facilitate representation, sharing and reuse of different types of knowledge. Moreover, multiple ontologies in OWL provide semantic foundation for interoperability between the system and other systems. In addition, problem-solving methods (PSMs) and SWRL-based rules are developed to enable automatic execution of knowledge-intensive activities. Furthermore, the system integrates the knowledge and workflow applications to monitor all the knowledge-intensive and non-knowledge-intensive activities and to improve system flexibility.