Modelling Sound Conflict Management for Virtual-Enterprise Collaboration

Enterprises today find themselves increasingly part of networks of collaborations with their peers in order to fulfil customer requirements. Such collaborations, also known as virtual enterprises (VE), are governed by pre-defined contracts that restrict the behaviour of each participating enterprise. However, since each enterprise is autonomous, conflicts could arise during the collaboration. In this paper, we extend our earlier work on virtual enterprise modelling and present an approach for conflict modelling and management in VEs. Our approach first detects a conflict by analysing the exception that is reported during execution. It then uncovers the type of conflict from the exception and, depending on the nature of the exception, proposes the appropriate conflict management strategy. Throughout this paper, we illustrate our ideas on a running example and also present an evaluation based on a case study from the automobile production domain.