An approach and decision support tool for forming Industry 4.0 supply chain collaborations

Industry 4.0 technologies, process digitalisation and automation can be applied to support the formation of supply chain collaborations in manufacturing. Underpinned by information and communication technologies, collaborations of independent companies can dynamically pool production capacities and capabilities to jointly react to new business opportunities. These collaborations may involve a wide range of enterprises with different sizes and scope that individually would not be able to tender for such new business opportunities. To form these collaborative teams, assistive processes and technologies can underpin the effort towards exploring the tender requirements, unbundling the tender into smaller tasks and finding a suitable supplier for each task. In this paper, we present an approach and a tool to support decision making concerning forming supply chain collaborations in Industry 4.0. The approach proposed is unique in integrating industry domain ontologies, assistive human-computer interaction tools and multi-criteria decision support techniques to form team compositions speeding-up the collaboration process whilst maximising the chances of forming a viable team to fulfil the tender requirements. We also show evaluation results involving stakeholders from the supply chain function pointing to the effectiveness of the proposed solution, available online as a demo.