An Instantiation Methodology for Virtual Breeding Environments Management-Edición Única

Abstract

Virtual Organization Breeding Environments (VBEs) are long-term cluster/associations of autonomous, geographically dispersed and heterogeneous organizations. The VBE aims to prepare its member’s organizations and support institutions, and enhance their readiness for potential involvement in collaboration opportunity-based Virtual Organizations. A Virtual Organization (VO) is defined as a temporally association of (legally) independent organizations that come together to share skills and resources to achieve a common goal, such as preparing a proposal (or a bid), or jointly performing the tasks needed to satisfy a market/society opportunity by co-producing products/services for the customer, and whose cooperation is supported by computer networks. Effectively managing of a Virtual Breeding Environment (VBE) is bound to the objective of preparing VBE members and maintaining this preparedness for collaboration in a Virtual Organization (VO). As such, preparedness is a strategic item that requires time to be established and must be refreshed and maintained throughout the entire VBE life cycle. Implementing and efficiently managing a VBE helps to shrink VO set-up times in contrast to selecting enterprises from an “open universe” of enterprises that never collaborated before. Collaboration Opportunities (CO) can be captured much faster and more reliably when using means of a VBE. Keeping enterprises prepared for collaboration requires management of various kinds of information and business processes. The VBE Management Framework proposed in this thesis is designed to depict all the management business processes needed to create, operate/evolve, metamorphe and dissolve a VBE according to the models and concepts developed within ECOLEAD project. The VBE Management Framework has the objective to give a prioritization of all VBE management processes to be supported by human or information system interactions through VBE life cycle. Finally, a VBE Instantiation Methodology, as a set of guidelines and suggested tools, is proposed to instantiate the VBE Management Framework in different Virtual Breeding Environments domains