Ontologies and Rules for Enterprise Modeling and Simulation

We propose to model an enterprise as an institutional agent with organizational units and human actors as subagents that participate in zero or more business processes involving other subagents of the enterprise and other agents, which are possibly affiliated with other organizations. Our approach, which unifies state structure and behavior modeling, leads to a more holistic model of an enterprise, and its multitude of business processes, compared to traditional BPM approaches, such as Petri Nets and BPMN, which are exclusively focused on single business processes. We discuss the ontological foundations of our approach and show the superiority of our rule-based modeling and simulation language AORSL, which allows the operational modeling of entire business systems and their business processes.