MS Thesis Defense
eXtensible Dynamic Form (XDF) for Supplier Discovery
Yan Kang
1:00PM Tuesday, 26 April 2011, ITE 346
Discovery of suppliers (supplier discovery) is essential for building a flexible network of suppliers in a supply chain. The first step for supplier discovery is to collect manufacturing capabilities of suppliers and requirements of customers. In traditional e-marketplaces, online form interfaces are typically used to collect the requirements and capabilities. However, those forms are mostly lack of flexibility to capture a variety of requirements and capabilities in a structured way. In this thesis, we propose new innovative form architecture called eXtensible Dynamic Form (XDF) to facilitate data collection process of supplier discovery.
This architecture provides several key innovations including: 1) architecture for users (suppliers or customers) to create new structure of form for their own contents; 2) an intelligent search engine facilitating users to reuse the existing form components 3) hierarchical representation of the requirements and capabilities as XML instances. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed architecture is valuable for facilitating the supplier discovery process.
Thesis Committee:
- Dr. Charles Nicholas
- Dr. Yun Peng (Chair)
- Dr. Yelena Yesha