Automating Design Support in Supply Chains on Semantic Web Services

The integration of four design attributes (componentcost, quality, function, and technology) streamlines product design by providing a multilateral view to designers that leads to cost savings in the supply chain. Since the existing information infrastructure, based on server-side components for these design attributes, does not provide interoperable Web interfaces or semantic service descriptions for agents, improved architecture for the semantic Web service environment where automating agents can work more efficiently is suggested. Based on an improved ontological paradigm which integrates product design attributes organically to improve agent efficiency, the building of a Web service environment for agents in DAML-S, which wraps the existing server-side software components to access attribute instance data, is explained. A prototype of an application-centric agent for design support in this environment and its evaluation are also described to illustrate the effectiveness of this Web service environment.