Use Case Decomposition for multi-standard Management to Enable Flexible Supply Chain

Published

October 27, 2025

Author(s)

Elena Jelisic, Boonserm Kulvatunyou, Salifou Sidi Mahaman Malick, Hakju Oh, Joshua Ki

Abstract

Flexibility is identified as a mandatory characteristic of today's supply chains. There are a few aspects of supply chain flexibility identified in the literature, and one of them is flexible supply chain integration. The standard for exchanging supply chain data plays a crucial role in that aspect. Today, business systems operate in different geopolitical, business process, and industry settings, and there is a great chance that they are using different Data Exchange Standards (DESes). Various approaches to deal with this heterogeneity exist; however, they can be exponentially time-consuming and expensive or may not meet desirable characteristics such as security constraints and varying use cases. In our recent paper, we proposed a novel approach based on the Core Component Specification (CCS) and its concept of the Business Context. Its central idea is the super (or federated) data model that gets updated as relevant DESes and enterprise information objects grow in the enterprise integration ecosystem. It provides a semantic layer to link different DESes. Along the super data model, two additional models were employed – the staging data model that enables the import of any type of data structure definitions, and the library-specific data model that enables their representations in the CCS-like form. This paper brings further investigation into the complexity of various industry use cases in dealing with multiple standards to achieve flexible supply chain integration. Our research collaboration with industry partners found that the industry may need up to six use cases, but commercial tools typically address only one of these use cases, data mapping. This paper formalizes and illustrates these use cases using two DESes – connectSpec and QIF. While the main contribution is the use case identification and decomposition, which will make the industry's needs more explicit, manageable, and automatable, the paper also outlines the user interfaces and backend needed to make the multi-standard management more productive. The future plan is the definition of automation, and the backend RESTful APIs that are needed to create user-friendly interfaces. The paper points out the issues that arose in the initial validation stage and improvements that need to be tackled in the future.

Proceedings Title

International Design Engineering Technical Conferences and Computers and Information in Engineering

Volume

2A

Conference Dates

August 17-20, 2025

Conference Location

Anaheim, CA, US

Conference Title

ASME 2025 International Design Engineering Technical Conferences and Computers and Information in Engineering Conference

Pub Type

Conferences

Download Paper

https://doi.org/10.1115/DETC2025-168568

Local Download

Keywords

Flexible Supply Chain, Integration, Data Exchange Standardization

Citation

Jelisic, E. , Kulvatunyou, B. , Sidi Mahaman Malick, S. , Oh, H. and Ki, J. (2025), Use Case Decomposition for multi-standard Management to Enable Flexible Supply Chain, International Design Engineering Technical Conferences and Computers and Information in Engineering, Anaheim, CA, US, [online], https://doi.org/10.1115/DETC2025-168568, https://tsapps.nist.gov/publication/get_pdf.cfm?pub_id=959792 (Accessed November 22, 2025)