The complexity of decision-making in process industries and the need of highly competitive organizations require new supporting tools to coordinate and optimize the information flow among decision levels. This work presents a framework for integrating the scheduling and control decision levels by means of an ontology, which allows and coordinates the information exchange among the different modeling paradigms/conventions currently used for the enterprise-wide optimization (EWO). The scheduling of two multiproduct batch plants with increasing complexity is presented for illustrating the proposed working procedure. (C) 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.