Digital manufacturing market: a semantic web-based framework for agile supply chain deployment

Manufacturing Market is a market in which manufacturing process capacity is the object of trade. In a market, units of capacity, represented as manufacturing services, can be acquired as needed and when needed, thus making supply chains more responsive to fluctuations in supply and demand. Although Manufacturing Market can be built physically as a spot market, its benefits can be better realized in a web-based framework. We refer to the web-based version of Manufacturing Market as Digital Manufacturing Market (DMM). The major challenges in deployment of a virtual market for manufacturing services include standard representation of manufacturing needs and capabilities, incorporation of intelligent supplier search and evaluation mechanism, and automation of supply chain configuration process. This paper introduces DMM through its major components including a multi-agent framework, a formal ontology for representation of manufacturing services as well as a matchmaking methodology used for connecting buyers and sellers of manufacturing services based on their semantic similarities. The ultimate goal of the proposed framework is to enable autonomous deployment of manufacturing supply chains based on the specific technological requirements defined by particular work orders.