In competitive and time sensitive market places, organisations are tasked with providing product lifecycle management (PLM) approaches to achieve and maintain competitive advantage, react to change and understand the balance of possible options when making decisions on complex multi-faceted problems, global production networks (GPN) is one such domain in which this applies. When designing and configuring GPN to develop, manufacture and deliver product service provision, information requirements that affect decision making become more complex. The application of reference ontologies to a domain and its related information requirements can enhance and accelerate the development of new product-service systems with a view towards the seamless interchange of information or interoperability between systems and domains. This paper presents (i) preliminary results for the capture and modelling of end-user information, (ii) an initial higher level reference core ontology for the development of reference ontologies and (iii) the formal logical modelling of Level 1 of the FLEXINET reference ontology using a Common Logic based approach

Abstract.Organisations constantly seek to improve and fully exploit global production networks. This can be to provide more competitive solutions to customer requests, to exploit potential new technologies or to consider new business models based on the servitisation of products. To support such decisions requires the interchange and evaluation of information from a wide range of different and varied sources. This paper puts forward a reference ontology aimed at supporting businesses who seek to design, configure and reconfigure global production networks. The aim of this is to support interoperability between information systems within multi-domain contexts.