Title: VE architect-driven partner selection: ontology-based approach

Authors: Alireza Khoshkbarforoushha; Masoumeh Tajvidi; Mehrnoush Shamsfard; Mohammad Aghdasi

Addresses: Department of IT Engineering, Tarbiat Modares University, P.O. Box 14115-111, Tehran, Iran ' Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Shahid Beheshti University, 1983963113, Tehran, Iran ' Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Shahid Beheshti University, 1983963113, Tehran, Iran ' Department of IT Engineering, Tarbiat Modares University, P.O. Box 14115-111, Tehran, Iran

Abstract: An underlying formation of instant virtual enterprises (VE) is the matter of flexible and efficient partner selection. In rapidly changing business environment and turbulent market conditions, selecting the partners for (re)configuration of VE must be realised regarding many factors such as skill, cost, resource, availability, goal, etc. However, these attributes primarily are not constant and may not be appropriate for some networks or conditions; hence they should be instantly replaced with some new ones. This imposes a demand that the VE architect selects partners in terms of changing criterion. Thus, we have to establish an adaptable and flexible partner selection mechanism that is driven by the VE architect's requirements. To achieve this, the paper proposes an ontology-based partner selection algorithm to effectively calculate the semantic similarity between VE architect's requirement ontology and partners' ontologies. The algorithm comprises diverse metrics including gravitation of resources (GoR), path similarity, path weight, and definition similarity which make it more close to VE architect. The paper also discusses implementation and evaluation of it using different approaches which confirm the quality, efficiency, and generality of algorithm.

Keywords: ontology; partner selection; instant virtual enterprises; architect-driven partner selection; semantics; semantic matchmaking; semantic similarity.

DOI: 10.1504/IJNVO.2013.057276

International Journal of Networking and Virtual Organisations, 2013 Vol.12 No.4, pp.283 - 309

Received: 19 Nov 2012
Accepted: 26 Jun 2013

Published online: 31 Mar 2014 *

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