D6.6 Connectors for Inter-factory Interoperability and Logistics II

A public software deliverable, led by ISMB, featuring the Connectors for Inter-factory Interoperability and Logistics; this updates D6.5.

The present document named “D6.6 Connectors for Inter-factory Interoperability and Logistics II” is a public deliverable of the COMPOSITION project, co-funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Framework Programme for Research and Innovation under Grant Agreement No 723145.

This deliverable presents the final results of the Task 6.3 “Connectors for Inter-Factory Interoperability and Logistics”. It aims to describe and analyse the final version of COMPOSITION Marketplace’s components. COMPOSITION has two main goals:

1. The integration of data along the value chain from the inside of a factory into one integrated information management system (IIMS).
2. The creation of a (semi-)automatic ecosystem that extends the local IIMS concept to a holistic and collaborative system incorporating and interlinking both the supply and the value chains.

The purpose of this deliverable is to further describe the development process related to the generation of the (semi-)automatic ecosystem. Particularly, the analysis will focus on:

• The design of the different connectors between the various marketplace components:
  • Marketplace Agents
  • Stakeholder Agents
  • Matchmaker Agent
  • Security framework
• The implementation of the connectors described above.
• A short description of every component.

The results of the analysis of all the aforementioned features have been implemented in the COMPOSITION Marketplace’s components. The Agents have been developed in a full custom way to avoid constraints coming from frameworks usage. The existing technologies have been analysed as state of the art, then, due to the project needs, the COMPOSITION Marketplace has been developed without using any of these frameworks but taking inspiration from those ones.

The Agent Management Service is the core Marketplace Agent that enable Stakeholder Agents to register to the COMPOSITION Marketplace and to take part to the negotiation process. Another Marketplace Agent developed is the Matchmaker. It supports semantic matching in terms of manufacturing capabilities, in order to find the best possible supplier to fulfil a request for a service with raw materials or products involved in the supply chain. Different decision criteria for supplier selection are considered by the Matchmaker according to several qualitative and quantitative factors.

The two Stakeholder Agents, requester and supplier work together to achieve the goal of creating new supply chains by negotiating in a semi-automatic way. They receive command through the UI from the owners exploiting a set of REST APIs developed during the project and reported in this document.

The negotiation is enabled by COMPOSITION eXchange Language, a language derived from FIPA ACL standard.

This language provide high flexibility thanks to a large set of action and the description of the message content by means of custom ontologies. The Security Framework together with the Blockchain layer is strongly interlaced with the COMPOSITION ecosystem, providing all the necessary security features as authentication, authorization, message integrity and message traceability.

The COMPOSITION Marketplace brings a new and dynamic way in supply chain creation. It has shown an easy and successful way in doing negotiation in a semi-automatic manner outperforming the old mechanism based on a full manual process that usually takes much more time.