Willy Picard - Böcker

COLLABORATIVE NETWORKS Becoming a pervasive paradigm In recent years the area of collaborative networks is being consolidated as a new discipline (Camarinha-Matos, Afsarmanesh, 2005) that encompasses and gives more structured support to a large diversity of collaboration forms. In terms of applications, besides the “traditional” sectors represented by the advanced supply chains, virtual enterprises, virtual organizations, virtual teams, and their breading environments, new forms of collaborative structures are emerging in all sectors of the society. Examples can be found in e-government, intelligent transportation systems, collaborative virtual laboratories, agribusiness, elderly care, silver economy, etc. In some cases those developments tend to adopt a terminology that is specific of that domain; often the involved actors in a given domain are not fully aware of the developments in the mainstream research on collaborative networks. For instance, the grid community adopted the term “virtual organization” but focused mainly on the resource sharing perspective, ignoring most of the other aspects involved in collaboration. The European enterprise interoperability community, which was initially focused on the intra-enterprise aspects, is moving towards inter-enterprise collaboration. Collaborative networks are thus becoming a pervasive paradigm giving basis to new socio-organizational structures.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the IFIP TC 5 WG 5.5 9th Working Conference on Virtual Enterprises held in Poznan, Poland. The IFIP series publishes state-of-the-art results in the sciences and technologies of information and communication. The scope of the series includes: foundations of computer science; software theory and practice; education; computer applications in technology; communication systems; systems modeling and optimization; information systems; computers and society; computer systems technology; security and protection in information processing systems; artificial intelligence; and human-computer interaction. Proceedings and post-proceedings of refereed international conferences in computer science and interdisciplinary fields are featured. These results often precede journal publication and represent the most current research. The principal aim of the IFIP series is to encourage education and the dissemination and exchange of information about all aspects of computing.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 16th IFIP WG 5.5 Working Conference on Virtual Enterprises, PRO-VE 2015, held in Albi, France, in October 2015. The 61 revised papers were carefully selected from 126 submissions. They provide a comprehensive overview of identified challenges and recent advances in various collaborative network (CN) domains and their applications, with a strong focus on the following areas: risks in collaborative networks; agility and resilience in collaborative networks; collaboration frameworks; logistics and transportation; innovation networks; governance in collaborative networks; collaborative communities; information and assets sharing; business processes; performance and optimization; and network formation.