Ontological Framework for Integrating Environmental Issues within Sustainable Enterprise: Enhancing Enterprise Decision-making

摘要

Ontologies stand for an excellent choice for building complex models while allowing a high level of flexibility, re-usability, usability and easiness of maintenance. This work proposes the re-use of an ontological model for the integrated enterprise in order to include the environmental assessment function. Since enterprises are complex systems involving different functionalities, decision-making becomes a highly challenging task, and decision process is usually separated in several levels. Nevertheless, such levels are closely related by the sharing of data and information. Therefore, effective integration among the different hierarchical levels, by means of tools which improve information sharing and communication, may play a crucial role for the enhanced enterprise operation, and consequently for fulfilling the enterprise's goals. The ontological framework provides a common modeling framework which facilitates integration among the different decision levels, and works as the mechanism for supporting information and knowledge sharing among multiple applications. The general semantic framework developed is applied to a case study comprising an enterprise supply chain network design-planning problem which considers environmental issues.