Open Source Supply Chains

This chapter deals with an ambitious Management Information System goal: the creation of open source supply chains. It starts with some basics and background for the open (source) supply chains, discusses relevant architectures and modelling work, proceeds to an analysis of real-world business cases and the related application scenarios, and presents an open source reference model. In current e-commerce frameworks, the issue of dynamic supply chain establishment and supply chain life cycle management is still misrepresented and not addressed adequately. Registration, advertisement, and change management for complex products and services heavily relies on proprietary application programming interfaces and protocols as well as emerging and partially competing (pseudo)standards.