A Web-Based Framework for Semantic Supplier Discovery for...

Web-based outsourcing has recently gained popularity among small and medium sized manufacturing companies as an efficient method for building flexible network of manufacturing counterparts. Several electronic marketplaces have emerged within the last few years with the objective of enabling large communities of buyers and sellers to virtually meet and establish new partnerships. Although e-marketplaces typically provide different automated search capabilities, they mainly rely on human users for final screening and evaluation of qualified suppliers. As the size of supply and demand pools increase, human-based search becomes inefficient. This paper describes an effort for enhancing the automation capabilities of web-based markets through an ontological approach. The proposed ontology is referred to as Manufacturing Service Description Language (MSDL). MSDL provides formal semantic for manufacturing services, thus enabling machine agents to actively participate in supplier discovery process. In particular, the focus of this paper is on the user interfaces required for describing the manufacturing requirements of particular work orders at a semantic level as well as the feature recognition module used for automated extraction of manufacturing requirements based on the CAD model of the parts. Published in the Proceedings of NAMRI/SME, Vol. 39, 2011.