  The evolution towards Industry 4.0 is driving the need for innovative
solutions in the area of network management, considering the complex, dynamic
and heterogeneous nature of ICT supply chains. To this end, Intent-Based
networking (IBN) which is already proven to evolve how network management is
driven today, can be implemented as a solution to facilitate the management of
large ICT supply chains. In this paper, we first present a comparison of the
main architectural components of typical IBN systems and, then, we study the
key engineering requirements when integrating IBN with ICT supply chain network
systems while considering AI methods. We also propose a general architecture
design that enables intent translation of ICT supply chain specifications into
lower level policies, to finally show an example of how the access control is
performed in a modeled ICT supply chain system.
