Modelling and simulation are two relevant facets for thorough and effective analysis of industrial systems that nowadays have to cope with the evergrowing complexity of the industrial processes and the need of modelling flexibility and knowledge sharing. For all these reasons, the following work seeks to explore and combine together different methodologies by exploiting their best features. In particular, the current research aims to combine semantic technologies, such as ontologies, and high-level Petri nets to revamp the actual assembly systems. Thus, key research concepts are presented, explaining such potential integration and providing a short example of the dynamic configuration of an assembly system within a semantically enriched modelling environment.