The research community, focused on future forms of organisations, has been addressing the challenges involved in the establishment of future collaborative networks of organisations (CNOs). Effective configuration and formation of CNOs require on one hand understanding, detailed capturing, modelling, and design of the components, structure, and behaviour of these environments, and on the other hand analysing their operational functionality and development of needed governing and ICT-based support mechanisms, tools, and systems. Coalitions in forms of virtual enterprises (VEs) and virtual organisations (VOs) constitute special forms of CNOs, which are goal-oriented and have shorter life duration, as opposed to the VO breeding environments (VBEs). VO breeding environments are long term strategic associations aimed to prepare their member organisations for agile dynamic formation of VOs, in response to emerged opportunities in the market/society. Both research and practice have shown in recent times that, besides generating more profit for the organisations, involvement in VOs increases their survivability chance in turbulent markets. Nevertheless, dynamic configuration and formation of effective coalitions in the form of virtual enterprises and virtual organisations involve many unresolved challenges and still an open area of research in need of innovation.
This special issue focuses specifically on topics related to methods and approaches for coalition formation, and comprises the extended version of a selection of papers from two prestigious international events of the PRO-VE’07 [www.di.uminho.pt/prove2007] conference held in Guimarães, Portugal in September 2007, and the BASYS’08 [www.basysconference.org] conference held in Porto, Portugal in June 2008. Both the PRO-VE series of conferences that are organised yearly, and the BASYS series of conferences that are organised every other year, are sponsored by the IFIP (International Federation for Information Processing) [www.ifip.org/bulletin/bulltcs/memtc05.htm] and the SOCOLNET (International Society of Collaborative Networks) [www.uninova.pt/~socolnet/joomla]. The main reasons for selecting 12 papers from the above two events for this special issue are briefly summarised below.
The PRO-VE conference was initiated in 1999, and today has established itself as the foremost scientific/technical event addressing both the research/academic innovations as well as the industrial business practices in the area of collaborative networks. The PRO-VE’07 was the 8th international conference of the series, out of which six papers are chosen and extended for this special issue. The BASYS series of conferences started in 1995, and cover a number of complementary topics in relation to collaborative networks, more focused on creating a balance between the human and computer aspects of collaboration. Six other papers selected and extended for this special issue, are from the proceedings of the BASYS’08 conference, the 8th international conference of the series. The BASYS’08 event also hosted and was encompassing a workshop organised by the large integrated project ECOLEAD [http://ecolead.vtt.fi] that was aimed as the final dissemination event for the large set of RTD results produced in this 4-year project. The ECOLEAD–IP (2004–2008) with 28 academic, research, and industrial partner organisations from 14 countries in Europe and Latin America, and funded by the European Commission within the 6th Framework Program, focused on addressing the foundations for collaborative networks, both from the theoretical and the system developmental points of view. Acting as a seed project in the area of CNOs, the ECOLEAD project is an ambitious initiative that itself was designed through a generic road-map study for collaborative networks performed by the EC funded project VOmap [www.uninova.pt/~vomap]. The ECOLEAD project has succeeded to set the foundation for the RTD on CNOs. Namely, among others it has established a comprehensive modelling framework for CNOs that contributed to the development of the ARCON reference model for collaborative networks, addressed in the book entitled: ‘Collaborative networks: reference modeling’ [www.springer.com/computer/communications/book/978-0-387-79425-9]. Further to addressing the theoretical foundation of the CNOs, the ECOLEAD project has established the base specification and prototyping of a set of novel ICT support functionality and tools for establishing CNOs, comprising: their conceptual frameworks and models, methods and processes, and software tools and systems, as addressed in the book entitled: ‘Methods and tools for collaborative networked organizations’ [www.springer.com/computer/communications/book/978-0-387-79423-5], and has especially contributed to the research in the area of VO breeding environments, management of VOs operation stage, and professional virtual communities (PVCs).
This special issue however is only focused on the methods and approaches applied to the formation of virtual enterprises, and, as such, it includes the extended version of a selection of best papers from the two events mentioned above. The 12 articles in this issue address and exemplify a variety of related aspects in different steps involved in formation and creation of the VOs. It starts with the pre-establishment stages of VOs, e.g., the stage of identification/characterisation of the emerged collaboration opportunities that initiate the need for establishing VOs, and ends with the final stage of analysis of different organisations’ criteria in order to, on one hand, evaluate them against the requirements set by the emerged opportunity, e.g., evaluation of the required performance criteria, and, on the other hand, to develop methods for enhancing the VO's chances for success and/or reducing some potential risks, e.g., through the alignment of organisations’ core-values. The last article of the issue addresses the role that needs to be played by universities in supporting the establishment of successful collaborative networks. A short description of each article follows.
The first article of this issue ‘A framework for computer-assisted creation of dynamic virtual organisations’ by Luis M. Camarinha-Matos, Ana Inês Oliveira, Michele Sesana, Nathalie Galeano, Damjan Demsar, Fabiano Baldo and Toni Jarimo, addresses the need for agility in reacting towards emerged collaboration opportunities (COs) in the fast changing markets/societies, as a key requirement for establishment of dynamic virtual organisations. It explains that an effective way to make the process of VO creation agile is to assume the pre-existence and the context of the virtual organisation breeding environment, which is itself one form of collaboration network. The VBE operates as an alliance/association of organisations, focused on preparing/enabling its members for potential engagement in dynamic virtual organisations; and thus supporting rapid formation of VOs in response to collaboration opportunities in the market/society. A computer assisted framework is proposed in the article to assist organisations, and particularly the VO broker and the VO planner, with a number of tasks. Namely, the suggested tools in the framework assist with finding suitable COs in the market (from the VBE) and characterising them, e.g., by their needed competencies, capacities, costs, etc., making a plan for establishment of the VO while fulfilling the CO requirements, and finding the best fit partners (potential organisations within the VBE) to form the needed coalition for accomplishment of the necessary CO requirements. All of the above tasks are further accompanied by a VO negotiation process, assisting the VO planner both with the process of selecting the best partners and in reaching agreements on different aspects and the details of the VO's configuration. Specification of the above set of ICT tools represented in the article, support different steps of the VO creation, as achieved within the ECOLEAD project, which provide a valuable contribution to the RTD in the CNO area.
The second article by David Romero, Nathalie Galeano and Arturo Molina ‘Mechanisms for assessing and enhancing organisations’ readiness for collaboration in collaborative networks’ addresses readiness challenges for organisations to be involved in collaborative networks, such as establishing: cooperation agreements, common operation principles, common interoperable infrastructures, common ontology, and mutual trust. It presents an approach for collaboration readiness assessment of organisations in VBEs, identifying the critical elements to be evaluated for participation in dynamic VOs. The approach also suggests enhancing mechanisms to improve organisations’ readiness level for collaboration.
The next article ‘An approach to assess collaboration readiness’ by João Rosas and Luis M. Camarinha-Matos, focuses on identification of levels of readiness for an organisation, applying on one hand the so called ‘hard’ factors such as competency fitness or technological compatibility, and on the other hand the so called ‘soft’ factors such as the organisation's character, willingness, or affectivity/empathy relationships with other organisations. Belief networks are suggested for performing inference about behavioural characteristics of organisations, and for decision making under uncertain situations. An example illustrates the integration of this approach with the VO's partner selection mechanism.
The article ‘A framework for selecting performance indicators for virtual organisation partners’ search and selection’ by Fabiano Baldo, Ricardo J. Rabelo and Rolando V. Vallejos, emphasises the need for agility in configuration and establishment of potential VOs in the current dynamic market. It focuses on the critical issue of selecting best fit partners for creation of virtual organisations. The article proposes a framework through which specific characteristics of the collaboration opportunity are used for selection of a set of indicators. These indicators are then applied against performance indicators of organisations, to guide the VO planner in the search for best fit partners, matching the collaboration opportunity.
The next article ‘On development of TrustMan system assisting configuration of temporary consortiums’ by Simon Samwel Msanjila and Hamideh Afsarmanesh, addresses management of inter-organisational trust in VBEs to support the creation of VOs. Dynamic formation of temporary consortiums, such as VOs, have become challenging, since organisations without previous history are reluctant to trust each other and collaborate efficiently. Therefore, one obstacle to configuration of VOs is the difficulty in finding potential trust-worthy partners. In the past, assessing trust level is performed in ad hoc manners, which hardly produces rational results. This article presents a supervised automation method and a system called TrustMan for rational assessment of trust level of organisations in coalition networks.
In the article ‘Partner selection in virtual enterprises: a multi-criteria decision support approach’ by José António Crispim and Jorge Pinho de Sousa, the authors emphasise that partner selection for virtual enterprises is a multi-criteria decision making problem with both tangible and intangible criteria. The defined approach applies a multi-objective tabu search metaheuristic that establishes an approximation of the Pareto front, as well as a fuzzy TOPSIS algorithm used for ranking alternative VE configurations. The illustrative example in the article and the preliminary computational results of the proposed approach demonstrate good potential for its practical application.
The article written by Ovidiu Noran, ‘A decision support framework for collaborative networks’ proposes a framework for a decision support system to help the planners of the VOs and enterprise architects with the formation and creation of the VOs. The main emphasis of the framework is to assist with both discovery of the VO project processes, referred to as ‘what needs to be done’, as well as in communicating these facts, referred to as their ‘justified beliefs’, to the organisations that may potentially become the VO partners. The content and use of the framework is also explained through an example in the context of a real-world scenario.
The next article by Marcus Vinicius Drissen-Silva and Ricardo J. Rabelo ‘A collaborative decision support framework for managing the evolution of virtual enterprises’ provides a framework and a supporting methodology to assist a member of the virtual enterprise with resolution of problems, when and if they arise, and with performing their discussions in a distributed and decentralised manner. Focused on achieving the VE's intended goals, the suggested methodology relies on approaches for change management, and the framework applies business process management (BPM) and service oriented architecture (SOA) approaches.
The article ‘Collaborative business frameworks comparison, analysis and selection: an analytic perspective’ by Claudia-Melania Chituc, Américo Azevedo and César Toscano, addresses an analytical perspective for selection of an e-business framework. It compares the so called ‘industry-neutral’ and ‘industry-specific’ e-business frameworks that are currently in use. It analyses these frameworks, specially focused on their strengths and weaknesses in relation to interoperability in a collaborative networked environment. It also addresses the application of a multi-criteria method, known as the analytic hierarchy process for selection of the suitable e-business framework. Real cases from industry exemplify the approach.
The next article ‘Privacy-based computation model in e-business’ by Raafat Aburukb, AbdulMutalib Masaud-Wahaishi, Hamada Ghenniwa and Weiming Shen, focuses on cooperation between different entities in the electronic market place and their privacy requirements. It advocates that the electronic market place is a promising architecture capturing cooperation between organisations, due to the nature of the current market, where entities may behave opportunistically and selfishly. Their proposed architecture for e-marketplace, is a collection of software agents in a cooperative distributed system, supporting the desired scheduling of services between market participants and preserving their desired level of privacy.
The article by António Abreu, Patrícia Macedo and Luis M. Camarinha-Matos ‘Elements of a methodology to assess the alignment of core-values in collaborative networks’ addresses the importance of aligning the core-values of partners for potential CNOs, to enhance the success of their collaboration. It proposes and exemplifies three perspectives for evaluation of alignment between core-values. The first perspective uses causal maps to capture the influence relationships among core-values. The second perspective uses a fuzzy inference system to capture the compatibility and incompatibility among core-values, and the third one uses a belief Bayesian network method to assess their alignment level using members’ past behaviour.
Finally, the last article ‘Universities as key enablers to develop new collaborative environments for innovation; successful experiences from Switzerland and India’ by Myrna Flores, Claudio Boër, Charles Huber, Adrian Plüss, Roger Schoch and Michel Pouly, discusses the role that can be played by universities in supporting the establishment and promotion of long term collaborative networks. A few such successful cases are addressed in the article, including the Virtuelle Fabrik and Swiss Microtech in Switzerland, and the TeNeT group in India. The article therefore addresses the key role that can be played by universities in fostering the needed knowledge transfer to the involved SMEs, as well as identifying the critical success factors (CSFs) for establishing new collaborative networks.
This special issue has assembled contributions from researchers and practitioners located in different regions in the world, and working in the area of CNOs. We are thankful to all authors as well as the referees for their contributions to raise the quality of the articles in this special issue, and also thankful to the Editor-in-Chief, J.E. Middle for this opportunity.
Related Research Data
