RAPID: Supply Chain Portal to Serve Entrepreneurs Producing Critical Items in Response to COVID-19

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This COVID-19 RAPID project combines the efforts of the NSF Convergence Accelerator Business Open Knowledge Network (BOKN) and Manufacturing Open Knowledge Network (MOKN) in order to develop a knowledge resource to support the discovery of manufacturers and materials suppliers to help assemble new supply chains, particularly focusing on personal protective equipment (PPE), such as ventilators. The BOKN encodes information about businesses and their capabilities, while the MOKN encodes manufacturing information about goods. By combining information and capabilities from both networks, this integrative COVID RAPID project will develop search and matching tools that will help entrepreneurs and manufacturers to adapt swiftly to the supply chains and processes needed to produce new types of products. The key information along with analysis capabilities for performing information extraction, data cleaning, and data representation will be accessible via a web portal, initially focusing on supply chains for PPE. The resources developed can be used equally well by small businesses and entrepreneurs as well as more established organizations. The project will harness data from a diverse set of sources, including manufacturing designs open-sourced by manufacturers; component information from shipping manifests; and manufacturing capabilities of firms sourced from websites and social media pages. Services provided via the web portal will enable users to find data, determine where to source components, and/or which designs to produce from these components. The project will develop an end-to-end system for generating, representing and populating new supply chains and processes focusing, initially, on the manufacture of PPE. These objectives will be achieved by the creation of enhanced interfaces for navigating company information, including relationships to other companies and profile information about each business. Learned representations of manufacturing firms will be developed in vector space models to better capture manufacturing capabilities and to investigate fuzzy matching capabilities for materials, parts, and sub-components. The materials and parts mentioned in patent claims for PPE will be of particular interest. The project will create the relationships between bill of lading data and domestic importers, and potential suppliers of materials and parts. Users will be able to integrate offerings from multiple information sources to rapidly meet emergent production needs, beginning initially with PPE, but extendibly to other critical products. This RAPID award is made by the Convergence Accelerator program in the Office of Integrative Activities and is associated with the Convergence Accelerator Track A: Open Knowledge Network.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.