Software Component Architecture for an Information Infrastructure to Support Innovative Product Design in a Supply Chain

Abstract

Existing methodologies to increase the efficiency of design of supply-chain management (SCM) processes consider cost, quality, function, and technology attributes of products separately. However, there is no integrated information infrastructure to consider these attributes together. We have devised new table structures to combine the 4 attributes and their relationships organically. We introduced simple ontology concepts for this information infrastructure, considering the supply-chain tree and the structure of attribute–relationship tables, with some restrictions from a general ontology for the semantic Web. We created basic database schemas using the designed ontology for the information infrastructure for SCM collaboration. We also developed a software component architecture that provides interface services to clients and other business logic in future semantic Web services based on this information infrastructure and using the component-based software development methodology. We built Servlet classes for Web presentation and used Enterprise JavaBeans, entity beans, and session beans for business logic. We also describe examples to demonstrate our information infrastructure. Experiments using the 3 platforms provide performance data that show the capability of our server-side software component system.