Ontological structuring of logistics services

The paradigm of cloud logistics is essentially built upon the virtualization of logistics resources from different logistics service providers. The virtualized resources are pooled and can subsequently be combined and encapsulated within customer-specific modular logistics services. The pooling within bigger logistics networks leads to a high quantity of different available logistics resources and services. Domain-specific structuring with the concept of the logistics service map helps to retrieve specific requested services from that quantity. The structuring of resources and services is a challenging task based on the semantic gap of differing wordings, descriptions used by different providers. The developed ontology design pattern for domain-specific structuring of logistics services can help to close the semantic gap as well as to enable the concept of the logistics service map. Structuring data and information (of services) from different providers can be made available, linked and interchanged easily within the network. Digitalized collaboration is supported and the disruptive paradigm of cloud logistics is enabled.