Semantic Distance, the Next Step?

Enterprise integration has, in the past, focused on strategies for complete harmonization of various dimensions using collected technologies and techniques. The virtual enterprise case presents us, almost by definition, with cases where preharmonized infrastructure is neither feasible nor desirable. Through international workshops, the community has identified a next-generation strategy for how to measure the imperfections in integration that will be encountered. Presumably, a new class of tools and strategies will emerge. The idea is still very early in its life. This chapter presents a snapshot of early conclusions. One proposal of a strategy is outlined.

Virtual Enterprise Coalition Strategy with Game Theoretic Multiagent Paradigm

Nowadays, virtual enterprise (VE) is a crucial paradigm of business management in an agile environment. VE exists in both service and manufacturing organizations, although the complexity of each enterprise in a VE may vary greatly from industry to industry. Obviously, there is a need for a mechanism through which these different functions can be integrated together transparently. In this contribution, we focus on the negotiation process in VE formulation as a basic research to clarify its effective management in terms of partner search. Each enterprise in VE is defined as an agent with multiutilities, and a framework of multiagent programming with game theoretic approach is newly proposed as a negotiation algorithm among the agents. Each unit is defined as an agent in our VE model, and their decision making is formulated as a game theoretic methodology. We develop a computer simulation model to form VEs through multiple negotiations among several potential members in the negotiation domain, and finally clarify the formulation dynamism with the negotiation process.

Virtual Enterprises and the Case of BIDSAVER

In recent years, several European projects have been launched aiming to research the new paradigm of virtual enterprise. The projects VIVE, BIDSAVER, and ALIVE are only some of which have run under the auspices of the European Commission Programme for Information Society Technologies (IST). This chapter presents the BIDSAVER project that ran between 1999 and 2002, and aimed at delivering technologies and methodologies that support the creation and operation of virtual enterprises.

BM_Virtual Enterprise

BM_virtual enterprise (BM_VE) is a virtual enterprise (VE) in a total or partial conformance with the BM_virtual enterprise architecture reference model (BM_VEARM). BM_VE is a kind of VE characterized as a dynamically reconfigurable network integrated over the global domain, satisfying the requirements for integrability, distributivity, agility, and virtuality as competitiveness factors. BM_VE uses three main mechanisms, or tools: market of resources, broker, and virtuality. This chapter presents the three fundamental mechanisms for the VE reconfiguration dynamics and virtuality; introduces the basic concept of the BM_VEARM, which serves as the conceptual and formal base for building BM_VE instances; shows the formal specification and theory of the structural aspects of the BM_VE as well as some aspects of the BM_VE reconfiguration dynamics; presents the BM_VE as an agile/virtual enterprise (A/VE); and finally, describes some important consequences of virtuality in BM_VE, i.e., that the BM_VE structure is hierarchical, a new definition of the VE (in which the network as the VE characteristic is irrelevant from the operational unit’s point of view), and the process of a “traditional” enterprise virtualization.

Virtuality and the Future of Organizations

This chapter aims at drawing a picture of how organizations are likely to develop in the context of “virtuality,” i.e., following the impact of technologies relevant to the information society. Organizations will expand their traditional boundaries to form new organizational patterns that will allow them to adapt to the changing environment of the information society as well as to exploit the opportunities of a digital economy. The chapter, therefore, shows how research, in particular research that was supported under the European Commission’s R&D programs, has played a significant role in shaping these developments. The research aimed at developing the underpinning information and communication technologies as well as at understanding the business processes and the socioeconomic impact of virtual organizations. Although many of the features of this new organizational paradigm are still not fully understood, there is hope that organizations in the future will be smart in various respects and will develop in a way that maximizes the leveraging of knowledge and innovation.

Dynamic Contract Generation for Dynamic Business Relationships

A dynamic virtual enterprise needs to be able to create, customize, and dismantle commercial relationships among partners quickly. The need to establish legal contracts before enactment begins can undermine the benefits gained by using advanced technology to form dynamic virtual enterprises, if it cannot be done quickly when needed, efficiently, in an up-to-date manner and result in a correct contract. There is, therefore, a need for the dynamic creation of contracts to reflect these constraints. An electronic representation of the contract can be constructed rapidly and brings the added advantage of being available to other software components. The chapter presents a novel method for generating a legal contract from the description of a business agreement. This is done by breaking up the constituent parts of the contract into clauses and using matchmaking technology to determine whether a clause is relevant for a given business agreement or not. A brief overview of the matchmaking technology that is used to do the transformations of a business agreement into a contract is given. We then show one specific detailed example of this approach — the translation of a business projection agreement into the relevant agreement in the legal projection, namely, a contract.

Integration in Cooperative Distributed Systems

A cooperative distributed systems approach is a promising design paradigm for many application environments, such as virtual enterprises, distributed manufacturing, e-business, and tele-learning. However, coordination is a major challenge in developing cooperative distributed systems in open environments. This chapter discusses in detail, brokering as a capability-based aspect of coordination in cooperative distributed systems. Architecturally, the brokering is viewed as a layer of services where a brokering service is modeled as an agent with a specific architecture and interaction protocol that are appropriate to serve various requests. The architecture of the proposed brokering layer supports ad hoc configurations among distributed, possibly autonomous and heterogeneous entities with various degrees of privacy requirements in terms of three attributes: entity’s identity, capability, and preferences. A prototype of the proposed architecture has been implemented to support and provide information-gathering capabilities in healthcare environments using a FIPA-complaint platform (JADE).

Broker Performance for Agile/Virtual Enterprise Integration

The implementation of the virtual enterprise (VE) model requires an agent, called a broker, who undertakes several functions and whose increased performance contributes to the searched agility of this organisational model. From the set of functions that the broker can provide to the VE, there are some that may explicitly contribute to the process of VE integration. One of the processes that contributes to VE integration, either in the project phase, during the resources system configuration, or in the operation phase, when the system reconfiguration is required, is the resources system selection process. We will approach, in this work, the importance of the broker in the resources system selection through the comparison of his performance in that process to the performance expected of the VE itself, if the person for whom it is responsible (or principal) performs the same process. This comparison is made based on the simulation results obtained from a numeric demonstrator specifically constructed to quantify the time and cost of the selection process for both the selectors (the broker and the principal). We demonstrate that the domain of advantage for the broker, i.e., where the broker’s performance exceeds the principal’s, grows with the dimension of the tasks plan and with the number of preselected resources, and also with the complexity of the selection method.

Collaborative Networked Organizations for Eco-Consistent Supply Chains

The present study aims at exploring how to turn information and communication technology (ICT) networked tools to supply cooperative added-value duties and ecocompatibility certifying activities, as competitiveness is the permanent goal, but ecosystem preservation is a nonremovable asset. The chapter is organized into four sections. The first introduces the basic sustainability paradigm shifts, to switch from the affluent to the thrifty communities, showing that the knowledge society critically affects this transition. The following section deals with the information framework requested to characterize the extended artefact (or product-service) on the life-cycle span, dismissal included. The subsequent section considers the collaborative networked organizations needed to support the ecoconsistency management of the extended artifacts by means of net concerns, under the direct oversight of independent certification bodies. The last section outlines trends in the economical, legal, political, and social surroundings, aiming at the appropriateness of Web platform options.

Virtual Enterprise Integration

Virtual enterprise integration (VEI) is virtually the most critical success factor for making virtual enterprise (VE) a real, competitive, and widely implemented organizational and management concept. However, according to many authors, the present solutions for VEI are either insufficient or inexistent. One of the reasons for the situation is the failure of the approach of “traditional” information systems and organizations to dealing with the nowadays turbulent market and organizations’ requirements, where actual VEI solutions are mainly sought. This chapter presents a discussion on the VEI issue as a contribution to a better understanding of the VEI phenomenon, and it could be seen as a contribution to an eventual framework for VEI science, engineering, development, and implementation. Also, two metatheoretical structures for VEI research and development are proposed: VEI abstractions hierarchy and VEI semiotics.