From Conceptualization to Model Generation: the Roles of Ontologies in Process Modeling

The expanding scope of systems tackled by process engineering and the increasing interest in different scales of systems require process modeling tools to be generic and extensible. These requirements are addressed in this work by employing ontologies in two different modeling phases. Firstly, a domain ontology providing a conceptualization of process systems is used by a conceptual modeling tool to generate conceptual process models. They are composed of instances of concepts and their relations as defined in the domain ontology. Secondly, a mathematical model generation engine is implemented using a general systems meta ontology. Employing the knowledge embodied in the meta ontology, this engine takes a conceptual process model as input and composes a mathematical model by means of selecting and customizing model building blocks stored in a library. In addition to the above roles of ontologies in developing models, it is also briefly discussed how ontology-based modeling can support the exchange of information between tools for modeling and design.