Ontology-Based Mobile Interface Adaptation for Monitoring Collaborative Supply Network Assets.

Abstract

Collaboration has been an essential part of Supply Chain Network because of involvements of different users at different level of the network. Communication and information exchange between buyers and sellers and transportation agents are considered as few of the main steps of collaboration in supply networks. Thus, an interface for all such communication and information exchange with quick response and monitoring of different stages of supply chain processes becomes a prime requirement in modern supply chain markets. An advanced management system for collaborative supply networks is the current demand of the market and this can bring competitiveness and free flow of information throughout the networks. One of the main focuses of such management system would be an advanced monitoring system of the Collaboration processes and stages of supply networks. This thesis focuses on research about the development of a simple mobile tool for monitoring collaborative Supply Networks and its assets. Advanced computational ability and enhanced data processing with in different web and mobile applications are gaining popularity in recent times which also increased the requirement of a dynamic atmosphere for the processing and computation of these data. Interactions of static types are designed in such a way that they are not always capable of handling big and complex data. This is because of the non-deterministic perspectives of pervasive computing environments. Adaptive user interfaces are commonly used in different software systems and popular for enhancing the performance of the users by taking care of general user context variables of the original systems such as user-context and user environment. This thesis work also emphasized on implementation of adaptive interfaces that can be used for collaborative Supply networks. The research work extended up to the possibility of adaptation of collaboration processes by modifying simple variables based on user context. This thesis research work aimed to design an ontology for collaborative supply network and implementation of user modeling with collaborative supply network model. The idea of using ontology with mobile tools is to apply different semantic rules in the collaborative supply network, which will help it to work more efficiently and help in adaptation in different level.