Ontology supporting green supplier selection process

At present, companies need to consider and include so-called ‘green strategies’ in order to retain competitive advantage. The common understanding of functionality of supply chain as well as collaborations among this between suppliers and partners means that companies need to do much more in order to ensure the greener effect. On the other hand, a scattered model of conducting businesses and global competition force companies to consider the necessity for development the activities of proper selection and evaluation of beneficial supply chain partnerships. Due to large amount of literature-based references of green supplier selection and evaluation, knowledge scattering of greener collaboration is noticeable. In addressing this research challenge, capturing knowledge in one place in the form of ontology for enabling selection and evaluation criteria of suppliers is proposed. Within this paper, an attempt to application of ontology-based model for supplier’ selection and evaluation criteria is developed. This model is implemented on base of distinctive set of criteria derived from revised literature, nevertheless the public and common availability of the proposed model suggests to other researches to collaborate in this field by adding, sharing and reusing knowledge of alternative criteria of green supplier’ selection.