A Service Driven Coordination Model in Virtual Enterprise

Coordination is one of the determinants in virtual enterprises. Partner enterprises in the virtual enterprise context need to corporate for common goals despite of differences or even conflicts in interests, culture, business practices and so on. Meanwhile, autonomy and privacy of each member should be considered. This paper proposes a multi-layer service driven model to support coordination in virtual enterprises. Configurability, negotiability and scalability are the characteristics and are described in detail. A workflow-like system is inducted to such architecture to improve the flexibility of VE. In order to clear the research scope of this paper, business process activities and contracts are defined in formal notation. Constraints are given to maintain the concision and validity of coordination. Finally it comes to the conclusion and some directions for further research