A Multi-ontology System for Modeling the Information Flow in a Warehouse

Abstract

ABSTRACT The following article proposes an information flow modeling within a warehouse using ontologies. Ontologies consist of facilitating communication and ensuring an understanding of contents of the exchanged messages between the system’s agents and the domain actors. This article aims at developing ontologies that describe the inner functioning of the warehouse in order to structure the vast amount of information and make it sharable and automatically treatable by the different entities of the system. General Terms Decision support, Artificial Intelligence, Logistics. Keywords Warehouse, Ontologies, Information Flow. 1. INTRODUCTION The warehouse is one of the major links in the supply chain; it plays a vital role in improving firms profitability and customer satisfaction [1]. In fact, the performance of the entire supply structure depends on the efficiency of warehousing logistics [2], consequently, optimizing warehouse operations [3] and organization [4] improves the productivity of the entire supply chain and reduces its costs. In this perspective, we seek to develop a decision support tool which optimizes the operational functions of a warehouse taking into account different physical flows [5] and information passing through. Information presents a know-how heritage and grey matter for a company [6], it is considered a strategic resource long as raw materials and energy. In this sense, the control of the information chain within a warehouse is essential in terms of improving productivity. It allows better information reuse as well as structuring the work of trades and exchanging with supply chain partners [7]. In this context, ontologies present a powerful tool of modeling for obtaining rich models in semantics and interoperable thanks to their possibilities of expressivity and reasoning. This work proposes a multi-ontologies system for modeling information flows within a warehouse.