An Approach to Formal and Semantic Representation of Logistics Services

Modern logistics systems are characterized by an increasing structural complexity and dynamicity, which arises from trends in the global economy, decomposition of supply chains and individual customer demands. These trends have amplified the need for greater flexibility in the (re-)configuration of supply chains and, additionally, the demand to move from centralized to decentralized IT solutions for planning and control. This paper presents an approach to achieve flexibility and decentralization in supply chain configuration and management. The approach combines loosely-coupled logistics services with semantic technologies for a unified representation of diverse logistics data and service functionalities. The contribution is a formal knowledge model of the information in the logistics domain using ontologies. The paper further discusses the semantic representation of logistic services in a framework that enables automated and intelligent techniques for discovery, ranking, execution and efficient composition of services into more complex and flexible logistics processes.