Ontologies Supporting Cooperations in Mass Customization – a Pragmatic Approach

Mass Customization (MC) as a modern competitive strategy enables enterprises to act in dynamic markets with high customer satisfaction. But, for a successful implementation of this management concept, effective information logistics is essential. Ontologies are considered as a promising approach for optimizing inter-organizational and distributed cooperation. Although there have been several publications on ontologies and their usage we are going to show that none of these approaches can satisfy the requirements of the Mass Customization domain completely. They either do not consider requirements like natural distribution and inherent heterogeneity of all members along the supply chain nor customer needs sufficiently, which are both typical properties in this domain. In this paper, a formal conceptualization of Mass Customization scenarios within an ontology will be introduced. Doing so, we will firstly illustrate the general concept of ontologies. Then we will discuss the components of an MC-ontology and its sub-models. The originalities of a particular domain are shown for the shoe industry as an example.