A semantic e-Kanban system for network-centric manufacturing: technology, scale-free convergence, value and cost-sharing considerations

Abstract

It is critical to facilitate business partners to be seamlessly interoperable with each other as the network-centric manufacturing (NCM) paradigm becomes a major trend in today's manufacturing environment. In this work, we propose a semantic e-Kanban inventory system where a semantic gateway is acting as a mapping hub to enable heterogeneous messages to be seamlessly exchanged between business partners on demand. The semantic gateway uses reasoning rules to map business partners’ proprietary data schemas and provides interoperability required for NCM. To observe the network dynamics of our proposed system, a discrete time dynamic model is built and shows its growth to a scale-free network with a convergence rate depending on the initial connectivity of the semantic gateway and preferential attachment parameters. To analyse the proposed system from an economic perspective, analytical and numerical studies are conducted showing that it has enough potential to reduce supply chain costs in comparison to those of the traditional approach. Finally, this study attempts to address the cost-sharing issue encountered when multiple partners are direct beneficiaries of the efficiency gain through a joint network-centric capability, but it is questionable who should pay for the capability implementation. The cost-sharing issue must be investigated because most network-centric capabilities would not be economically or technically feasible for an individual company to achieve.