A model for collaborative decision-making for the evolution of virtual enterprises

Abstract

Grounded on Project Management and Decision Support Systems foundations, this paper presents a distributed environment to support collaborative discussion and decision-making for managing the evolution phase of a Virtual Enterprise (VE). VE evolution deals with problems during the VE operation and that put its goals on risk. The main rationale of this work is that VE members are autonomous and hence that all the affected partners should discuss about the necessary changes on the current VE's plan in order to generate a feasible new plan. In the presented approach this discussion is guided by a flexible decision protocol and the impact of decisions can be evaluated. Final results of a prototype implementation are discussed in the end. © 2012 International Federation for Information Processing.