Control issues in the creation of virtual enterprise

This paper discusses some of the issues we are facing in our development of tools for constructing virtual enterprises (VE). These tools are based on concurrent engineering (CE) techniques we previously developed for automating mechanical and software system design. As we apply these methodologies to automating processes in a VE, we are finding that many of the issues that arise should properly be considered “control problems”. The focus of this paper is on describing the problems and discussing our general approach including where we think computer-aided systems will succeed in solving the problems and what results are needed to achieve such success