Abstract
This paper outlines the development and construction of an ontology necessary to accurately represent the concepts of a generic enterprise, primarily in a manufacturing context, for use with a discrete event simulation (DES) engine. Accuracy in this sense, means that the DES can be used as an operational and tactical decision making tool, and will be able to inform the end-user which decision is the optimal one (with respect to a set of key performance indicators), with a high degree of confidence. The ontology focuses on make-to-order and build-to-order enterprises, which operate a shop-floor arrangement, as opposed to an assembly-line system. The principal concepts dealt with in the ontology are orders, workflows and activities, resources, and calendars. The ontology is built as a frame-based Protégé, self-generating XML model. This work is part of the authors' continuing research into the area of generic simulation modelling for enterprises. The generated XML code from the ontology feeds into a stochastic simulation application, Em-Plant, via XPATH queries and instantiates a model on which simulations and experiments can be run.