Virtual Organization Process Integration and Execution Through Grid Computing -Edición Única

Abstract

We find ourselves in times where globalization presses the enterprises to overcome new challenges to be able to remain competitive in the free market. The Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) are faced with more difficult challenges to be able to compete with bigger enterprises given that they don’t have a great production capacity. A solution for the SMEs is to create new forms of organization. Enterprises are starting to organize themselves into networks of collaboration (Collaborative Networked Organizations, CNOs) to increase their abilities and capacities to compete. Collaborative Networked Organizations enable the creation of Virtual Organizations (VOs.) With the creation of VOs, the small enterprises increase their potential to obtain bigger contracts and increment their profit. An obstacle that VOs are faced with, is that the enterprises that comprise them are geographically dispersed; a problem which can result in costly expenses for the members of the VOs and is not always possible to achieve. An initiative is required in order to create tools that support the integration of the VOs to business processes that contain all activities in the life cycle. The creation of various tools that would help organize and administer the communication of the VOs’ members would be an important contribution to the problem but can be a challenge to implement. This dissertation applies Grid Computing as a viable technology to solve this dilemma. Grid Computing is a scientific computational model to solve complex problems through a parallel infrastructure. This technology was originally intended to be used to solve computational problems and the model began to be used in a higher level, that is, at corporate level. The creation of a similar framework has already been approached by using Web Services; this thesis demonstrates that by utilizing Grid Computing, an alternate tool for collaborative process can be discovered.