Towards a Semantic Matchmaking Algorithm for Capacity Exchange in Manufacturing Supply Chains

Within supply chains, companies have difficulties in finding suppliers outside their known supplier pool or geographical areas. The EU project MANUSQUARE aims to deploy a marketplace to match supply and demand of supply chain resources to facilitate accurate and efficient matchmaking. To this end, a semantic matching algorithm has been developed as one of the key enablers of such a marketplace. The algorithm exploits formal descriptions of resources provided by an ontology developed in the project and will later be extended to incorporate additional data from different endpoints. This paper describes the main components of the semantic matching algorithm, which on the basis of the formally described supply chain resources returns a ranked list of relevant suppliers given a customer query. The paper further describes a comparative evaluation of a set of common semantic similarity techniques that was conducted in order to identify the most appropriate technique for our purpose. The results from the evaluation show that all four techniques perform pretty well and are able to distinguish relevant suppliers from irrelevant ones. The best performing technique is the edge-based technique Wu-Palmer.