Ontologies for supply chain simulation modeling

Abstract

Simulation might be an effective decision support tool in supply chain management. The review of supply chain simulation modeling methodologies revealed some issues one of which is the practicability of simulation in the supply chain environment. The supply chain environment is dynamic, information intensive, geographically dispersed, and heterogeneous. In order to develop usable supply chain simulation models, the models should be feasibly applicable in the supply chain environment. Distributed simulation models have been used by several researchers, however, their complexity and usability hindered their continuation. In this paper, a new approach is proposed. The approach is based on Ontologies to integrate several supply chain views and models, which captures the required distributed knowledge to build simulation models. The Ontology core is based on the SCOR model as the widely shared supply chain concepts. The ontology can define any supply chain and help the user to build the required simulation models.