In production plants, monitoring and maintaining industrial processes and emergency shutdowns are not straightforward tasks due to the large number of events and alarms which are triggered during the plant shutdown process. It is also vitally important to provide decision support to stakeholders for efficient and effective monitoring and maintenance of production process. This paper presents a novel framework and design to enhance maintenance decisions based on the knowledge gathered through the process of monitoring. This monitoring process is based on signals which are triggered during the plant safety shutdown process. We have designed and implemented a framework using an ontology and business rules to define the logical structure and operation of the petroleum plant with the objective of monitoring the cause and effect of the petroleum plant shutdown process. To enhance maintenance decisions, we have extended the ontology and the framework to ensure that decision makers have sufficient information to make the right decision at the right time. The proposed extended framework is designed, implemented and evaluated using an example petroleum production plant as a case study. (C) 2012 Published by Elsevier Ltd.