First Steps Towards Bridging Simulation and Ontology to Ease the Model Creation on the Example of Semiconductor Industry

With diverse product mixes in fabs, high demand volatility, and numerous manufacturing steps spread across different facilities, it is impossible to analyze the combined impacts of multiple operations in semiconductor supply chains without a modeling tool like simulation. This paper explains how ontologies can be used to develop and deploy simulation applications, with interoperability and knowledge sharing at the semantic level. This paper proposes a concept to automatically build simulations using ontologies and its preliminary results. The proposed approach seeks to save time and effort expended in recreating the information for different use cases that already exists elsewhere. The use case provides first indications that with an enhancement of a so-called Digital Reference with Semantic Web Technologies, modeling and simulation of semiconductor supply chains will not only become much faster but also require less modeling efforts because of the reusability property.