Semantic Supplier Contract Monitoring and Execution DSS Architecture

This research is motivated by the critical problem of stark incompatibility between the contractual clauses (typically buried in legal documents) and the myriad of performance measures used to evaluate and reward (or penalize) supply participants in the extended enterprise. This difference between what is contractually expected and what is actually performed in addition to the lack of transparency of what is measured and how those measures relate to the contractual obligations make it difficult, error prone and confusing for different partner organizations. To address this critical issue, in this article, we present a supplier performance contract monitoring and execution decision support architecture and its prototype implementation using a business case study. We use the SWRL extension of OWL-DL to represent contract conditions and rules as part of the ontology and then use the Jess Rule Reasoner to execute the contract rules integrating with Service Oriented Computing to provide decision support to managers in the extended enterprise.