Supporting Web-based collaboration between virtual enterprise partners

Many of the processes in a dynamic virtual enterprise (VE) are collaborative in nature and require consideration of cross-organizational issues. We present a way of supporting Web-based collaboration between organizations within a dynamic real-time virtual enterprise. In our approach we focus on a service-oriented view of collaboration that is compatible with emerging Web service industry standards based on XML, SOAP, and WSDL. We also introduce a collaboration system, which uses multiagent system (MAS) technology and specialized tuplespaces to realize many of the desired categories of automated support.