Semantic Web as Driver of Collaborative Demand Capacity Planning

Supply Networks in the automotive industry are confronted with a lot of challenges business and technical ones. One of the technical issues is the heterogeneous and different ICT platforms which are show-stopper to implement enterprise interoperability services. Besides other measures Semantic Web approaches could provide mitigation to solve this issue. Ontology is the basic problem which must be solved before the Semantic Web approaches could be applied. In the specific case of suppliers in automotive industry the so called Bill of Material (BOM) could be easily defined as a “slight” ontology. Especially the agreement on the ontology could be pushed by the leading partner of tier in the Supply Chain. That’s why the two approaches namely Collaboration Agents and Semantic Annotation of Web Services will be pursued in the following paper. After having overcome the technical challenge on semantics the business oriented ones could be solved, which cover a fast shift in the portfolio of an OEM, where it must be taken into account that only 20% of parts of a car are produced directly in the plants of the OEM and the remaining overwhelming parts are delivered by suppliers in different tiers.