Abstract
Recently there has been an increased interest in agent-based environments for automated design and simulation (Garcia-Flores et al. 2000). In such environments, responsibility for decision making is partly removed from the engineer to the underlying agent framework. Thus, it is vital that pertinent knowledge is embedded within this framework. This motivates the development of an ontology (Gruninger & Lee 2002) for the particular domain. An important first step is a suitable organisation of the knowledge in a given domain. © 2003 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.