Building an Ontological Bridge Between Supply Chain Resilience and IoT Applications

The complexity of modern-day supply chains makes logistics operations more vulnerable towards disturbances, which endangers sustainability goals in the short-term. Local disturbances might effect logistics at large, as we typically see in congested urban areas. As a consequence, the Internet of Things (IoT) is gaining attention as a novel paradigm that promotes interconnected networks of context-aware electronic devices used for remote monitoring and control. These capabilities may stimulate anticipatory behaviour and more resilient supply chains, but a clear framework prescribing which objects to empower with electronic devices is still lacking. In this paper, we aim to semantically bridge the resilience and IoT paradigms in logistics environments. The ontology is developed by means of a bibliometric- and systematic literature study in search of essential concepts, and a field study to evaluate the ontology’s effectiveness. Our ontology can form the basis to enhance resilience by replacing risk assessments with condition-based control mechanisms, resulting in better cooperation between human and software agents to resolve disturbances quicker, and more accurate training of machine learning algorithms in favour of autonomous decision making.