Tendencies in Manufacturing Systems Organization   

    The new market trends, shaped by the globalization of the economy and the formation of large economic blocks, such as the European Union, NAFTA or MERCOSUR, are forcing companies to achieve world class manufacturing levels. Furthermore, requirements for highly flexible / reactive systems, with high quality standards, but constrained by environment friendly requirements, are leading companies to new forms of organizations, relying on privileged cooperation links (Doumeingts et al., 1995), (Camarinha-Matos et al. 1999).

Nowadays, most of the manufacturing process is not carried out by a single enterprise anymore. Companies feel the need to focus on their core competencies and join efforts with others, in order to fulfill the requirements of the new products / services demanded by the market. In a cooperative networked organization, every enterprise is just a node that adds some value to the process - a step in the manufacturing / supply chain. Although most classic examples of networked organizations can be found in some particular business domains such as the automotive industry, this tendency is spreading to many other areas also including the food and agribusiness industry (Walton, 1996), (Camarinha-Matos, 1997). The concept of Virtual Enterprise (VE) therefore emerges. A virtual enterprise is a temporary alliance of enterprises that come together to share skills or core competencies and resources in order to better respond to business opportunities, and whose cooperation is supported by computer network. A VE materializes by selecting skills and assets from different firms and synthesizing them temporarily into a single functional business entity to respond to business opportunities.

The cooperation among the enterprises involved in a VE is supported by computer networks and other information technology tools. In fact, cooperation between enterprises is not a recent phenomenon at all. For instance, in the civil construction sector there is a long-time tradition of cooperation in consortia to jointly develop large projects. The novelty factor introduced by the virtual enterprise paradigm is the strong use of computer networks and advanced information technologies to better support the cooperation among companies. As a consequence of the new facilities offered by these technologies that support both a more effective integration and coordination of activities and the geographical distribution of the involved industries, new forms of organizing the business processes and new ways of working are naturally emerging.

    Several new industrial manufacturing paradigms have emerged in recent years as an answer to the new challenges of globalization, such as the virtual manufacturing, lean enterprise, agile manufacturing, and holonic systems. The introduction of these concepts in the enterprises has made them face successive “waves of restructuring” during the last decades. The emergence of the virtual enterprise paradigm comes in the natural sequence of these restructuring processes enabled by the “explosive” developments in the information and communication technologies.  The need to remain competitive in the open market forces companies to seek “world class” status and, therefore, to concentrate on their core competencies while looking for alliances when additional skills / resources are needed to fulfil business opportunities. The materialization of this paradigm, although enabled by recent developments in communication technologies and computer networks, requires the definition of a reference architecture for collaboration among enterprises, and the design and development of a cooperation infrastructure with supporting platform, appropriate protocols, and coordination mechanisms.

Activities world-wide

    The research area of VE represents a complex, large scale and multidisciplinary domain. The cooperation scenario in VEs involves distributed/federated, heterogeneous, and autonomous agents representing both software and people. A large number of projects, worldwide, are nowadays addressing different aspects of infrastructures for virtual enterprises. Some of the most representative ones are the North American NIIIP and the European VEGA, X.CITTIC, PLENT, MARVEL OUS, and PRODNET II.

Similar initiatives addressing VE challenges are ongoing in other geographical areas of the world.  For instance in the framework of the IMS (Intelligent Manufacturing Systems) program, an initiative involving the USA, European Union, Japan, Switzerland, Canada and Australia, with various related works can be found. One example is the GLOBEMAN 21.

Other examples can be found in the INCO and ALFA Programs (cooperation between the European Union and third countries, e.g. with the Latin-America): MASSYVE, COSME-GVE, SCM+, etc.

Furthermore, it shall be mentioned that a large number of initiatives are also taking place in the area of Electronic Commerce. From these initiatives several results are of major importance for the establishment of a VE environment, such as the safety and authentication mechanisms, business transactions, and electronic catalogs.

In spite of the efforts being put in this area, the current approaches and the developed experimental prototypes are quite limited, still lacking a comprehensive and flexible characterization of the multiplicity and variety of the cooperation scenarios.

IFIP sponsored events

    The topic of Virtual Enterprises and Electronic Business has become part of several recent IFIP sponsored events and international conferences, such as the BASYS’98, PROLAMAT’98, DIISM’98, the Panel on Virtual Enterprises (in the World Computer Congress in Vienna, 1998), APMS’99, BASYS 2000, etc.

    A specific working conference on Infrastructures for Virtual Enterprises (PRO-VE) has been launced this year –  the PRO-VE’99,  27-28 Oct 99,  Porto,  Portugal. The PRO-VE 2000 international conference is also planned to be held in Brazil, on 4-5 December 2000.