Research On Enterprise Interoperability For Cluster Supply Chain

In the global economic environment, companies are no longer isolated individuals. As a part of the supply chain, enterprises cooperate with others frequently, to improve their competitiveness through integrating resources inside and outside the enterprise effectively, especially in the Cluster Supply Chain (CSC). Cluster supply chain is a kind of supply chain coupling with the industrial cluster, enterprises within this region are in urgent need to promote the efficiency of business cooperation by means of system interoperation, which is now seriously impeded by the high heterogeneity of the product structure, organization structure and business processes among different enterprises. Although supply chain system integration is studied by many scholars, due to the highly heterogeneity of the enterprise information systems and the diversity and dynamics of enterprise models, supply chain system integration becomes more and more complex, especially in the environment of cluster supply chain which consists of large amount of SMEs and the otherness of enterprises more obvious differences between different enterprises and systems, it is more urgent to realize in-time information sharing and effective business collaboration by system interaction and integration among the enterprises.This paper is supported by the national863project "the block-economy oriented research on service support technology and platform for cluster supply chain", key innovative team building project of Zhejiang province and other related research projects. Aiming at the problems in the environment of cluster supply chain such as grammatical and semantic heterogeneity and cross enterprise process collaboration, the following work is carried out:1) A method of CSC-oriented, semantic-based enterprise interoperability is proposed.Taking the characteristics of big amount of SMEs, highly heterogeneity of information systems and the complexity and dynamics of business process under the circumstance of cluster supply chain into consideration, a CSC-oriented enterprise interoperability framework is proposed. Considering the limitation of current research in the aspects of framework, a method of CSC-oriented, semantic-based enterprise interoperability is proposed. The method bases on an ontology system, modeled at different levels of enterprise interoperability and inter-connected closely, resolves conflicts at different levels, after that, an entire methodology is built to realize interoperability at all levels.2) An ontology system supporting enterprise interoperability under the environment of CSC is constructed, and feasible methods of ontology building suited to CSC are proposed.Ontology is introduced to resolve enterprise semantic conflict problems during business cooperation. Separation of concern rule is obeyed; the ontology system is divided into several parts and organizing the parts according to the interoperable manner among enterprises in CSC. Under the environment of cluster supply chain, in consideration of the complexity of domain knowledge and large amount of SMEs, a fast and effective method of enterprise collaboration ontology building via ontology learning is proposed based on two available data sources. A method of business collaboration shared ontology building is presented based on multistep coordination mechanism, conforming to the characteristics and types of CSC.3) An ontology-driven semantic conflict resolving method for CSC is proposed.Considering the multiformity of semantic conflicts among different enterprise collaboration ontologies, an ontology-driven semantic conflict resolving method for CSC is proposed. Four dimensions are introduced to describe the characteristics of ontologies against the diversity of the ontologies, and the weights of strategies corresponded with ontology characteristic are dynamically adjusted to optimize the mapping results. Collaboration shared ontology is fully exploited as background knowledge to excavate new mapping pairs hidden in enterprise ontologies and eliminate error mappings under certain mapping scene. The reuse of knowledge is realized through sharing conflicts resolution from different enterprises.4) Inter-enterprise process collaboration method based on view match is proposed. The process of Inter-enterprise process collaboration in the environment of cluster supply chain is quite complicated. Not only should the distributives, privacy, heterogeneity of enterprises, but also dynamics and mismatching of business process be considered. In view of the problems above, an inter-enterprise process collaboration method based on view matching is presented. This approach is business-driven which conduct business collaboration modeling according to SCOR model and existing process library of the enterprise, and dig out the business cooperation point from the business collaboration model. The business process is modeled by the method of Petri net and abstracted by symbol observation graph to reduce the visibility, and published in collaboration view library. In order to improve the efficiency of business process matching, the process of business process matching is implemented through two steps, business semantic matching and transformation processes matching detection. After transforming the business cooperation point to interoperation point and encapsulating multifarious applications of enterprise into Web services, inter-enterprise integration is realized by services orchestration and combination.The research of this paper has been applied to CSCEIPS platform. The effective operation of the platform validates the feasibility of the method.