A Decision and Transparency Support Service for Moderation Management of Virtual Enterprises in Collaborative Networks

Successful management of collaborative business in company networks calls for efficient moderator processes in assigning companies to a particular request. The moderator makes configuration decisions that generate a Virtual Enterprise (VE) as a set of companies from the network members. Alternative configurations are evaluated and the most fitting VE configuration is chosen. The moderator is furthermore required to make the configuration decisions transparent in order to achieve decision acceptance by the network members. We present corresponding information technology based services that allow moderators to meet these requirements by supporting the decision making as well as supporting the distribution of the corresponding decision information. The decision support service computes ranked configuration alternatives according to a given search profile. The transparency support service generates decision explanations which contain the rationale behind the final decision as well as both the aggregated decision information and individualized data directed towards the single company.