Self-organizing virtual enterprises

Abstract

We reintroduce a model of virtual enterprises that is based on features, from customer needs to delivered product. The features in this case correspond to agents that exhibit self-organizing, emergent behavior. The most innovative notion is that features have all the mechanisms necessary to evolve an optimized virtual enterprise. The notion of "narrative urge" is introduced. The first part is some history of the discovery of types of virtual enterprises, placing the reintroduced concept in perspective. Then we define the notion of a functional agent, feature-driven domain intuitively, indicating some challenges. Then follows an overview of a general theory of emergence. The virtual enterprise case is mapped to that. A scenario is indicated. Due to space limits, only an overview is given.