Luis M. Camarinha-Matos – författare

Industries and particularly the manufacturing sector have been facing difficult challenges in a context of socio-economic turbulence characterized by complexity as well as the speed of change in causal interconnections in the socio-economic environment. In order to respond to these challenges companies are forced to seek new technological and organizational solutions.

In this context two main characteristics emerge as key properties of a modern automation system – agility and distribution. Agility because systems need not only to be flexible in order to adjust to a number of a-priori defined scenarios, but rather must cope with unpredictability. Distribution in the sense that automation and business processes are becoming distributed and supported by collaborative networks.

Emerging Solutions for Future Manufacturing Systems includes the papers selected for the BASYS’04 conference, which was held in Vienna, Austria in September 2004 and sponsored by the International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP).

The area of Virtual Organizations as a main component of the new discipline of Collaborative Networks has been the focus of research globally. The fast evolution of the information and communication technologies and in particular the so-called Internet technologies, also represents an important motivator for the emergence of new forms of collaboration. However, the research in many of these cases is highly fragmented, considering that each project is focused on solving specific problems. As such, there is no effective consolidation/harmonization among them in order to have an effective impact and facilitate the interaction among the involved experts.

This book represents a contribution to the consolidation of the already vast amount of empirical knowledge and practical experience. A synthesis of results collected from the analysis of numerous projects and industry case studies is presented, with focus on: Principles and models, ICT infrastructures and tools, Implementation issues, and Case studies.

Progress in collaborative networks continues showing a growing number of manifestations and has led to the acceptance of Collaborative Networks (CN) as a new scientific discipline.  Contributions to CN coming from multiple reference disciplines has been extensively investigated.  In fact developments in CN have benefited from contributions of multiple areas, namely computer science, computer engineering, communications and networking, management, economy, social sciences, law and ethics, etc.  Furthermore, some theories and paradigms defined elsewhere have been suggested by several research groups as promising tools to help define and characterize emerging collaborative organizational forms.  Although still at the beginning of a long way to go, there is a growing awareness in the research and academic world, for the need to establish a stronger theoretical foundation for this new discipline and a number of recent works are contributing to this goal.

From a utilitarian perspective, agility has been pointed out as one of the most appealing characteristics of collaborative networks to face the challenges of a fast changing socio-economic context.  However, during the last years it became more evident that finding the right partners and establishing the necessary preconditions for starting an effective collaboration process are both costly and time consuming activities, and therefore an inhibitor of the aimed agility.  Among others, obstacles include lack of information (e.g. non-availability of catalogs with normalized profiles of organizations) and lack of preparedness of organizations to join the collaborative process.  Overcoming the mismatches resulting from the heterogeneity of potential partners (e.g. differences in infrastructures, corporate culture, methods of work, and business practices) requires considerable investment.  Building trust, a pre-requisite for any effective collaboration, is not straight forwardand requires time.  Therefore the effective creation of truly dynamic collaborative networks requires a proper context in which potential members are prepared to rapidly get engaged in collaborative processes.  The concept of breeding environment has thus emerged as an important facilitator for wider dissemination of collaborative networks and their practical materialization.

The PRO-VE''05 held in Valencia, Spain, continues the 6th event in a series of successful working conferences on virtual enterprises.  This book includes selected papers from that conference and should become a valuable tool to all of those interested in the advances and challenges of collaborative networks. 

-VO breeding environments; -Formation of collaborative networked organizations; -Ontologies and knowledge management; -Process models and interoperability; -Infrastructures; -Multi-agent approaches.

Collaborative Networked Organizations represent one of the most relevant organizational paradigms in industry and services. A large number of developments in recent years have turned Collaborative Networks into a pervasive phenomenon in all socio-economic sectors.

The main aim of this book is to provide a comprehensive set of reference materials derived from the results of the ECOLEAD project in one organized volume. The ECOLEAD project, a large 4-year European initiative, involved 28 organizations (from academia, research and industry), from 14 countries (in Europe and Latin America).

Three main types of results from ECOLEAD are presented: (i) Conceptual frameworks and models, (ii) Methods and processes, and (iii) Software tools and systems. Furthermore, the experience and lessons learned with a number of large pilot implementations in real-world running networks of enterprises are also included as an indication of the assessment/validation of the project results.

Methods and Tools for Collaborative Networked Organizations provides valuable elements for researchers and practitioners involved in the design, implementation, and management of collaborative forms in industry and services.

Collaborative Networks: Reference Modeling works to establish a theoretical foundation for Collaborative Networks. Particular emphasis is put on modeling multiple facets of collaborative networks and establishing a comprehensive modeling framework that captures and structures diverse perspectives of these complex entities. Further, this book introduces a contribution to the definition of reference models for Collaborative Networks.

Collaborative Networks: Reference Modeling provides valuable elements for researchers, PhD students, engineers, managers, and leading practitioners interested in collaborative systems and networked society.