Enabling mass customization through semantic Web services

Abstract

In order to satisfy individual customer needs with near mass production efficiency, product manufacturers need to effectively collaborate with their dynamic value chain partners along the product lifecycle process. A primary need is to develop semantic interpretations related to business processes and documents to all value chain partners. We propose a semantic Web service oriented framework to fulfil the task using OWL-S. We present a product family ontology and sketches of two core services: Product configuration and product lifecycle cost estimation. We believe that with the benefits of rich semantic descriptions from OWL-S, effective value chain integration can be developed - this is the key to successful mass customization. © 2007 IEEE.