Catálogo de publicaciones - libros

A virtual enterprise (VE) is a temporary organization that pools member enterprises core competencies and exploits fast changing market opportunities Partner selection can be viewed as a multi-criteria decision making problem that involves assessing trade-offs between conflicting tangible and intangible criteria, and stating preferences based on incomplete or non-available information. In general, this is a very complex problem due to the large number of alternatives and criteria of different types. In this paper we propose an integrated approach to rank alternative VE configurations using an extension of the TOPSIS method for fuzzy data, improved through the use of a tabu search meta-heuristic. Preliminary computational results clearly demonstrate its potential for practical application.

E-contracts have been broadly used to improve business-to-business collaboration. Different e-contracting activities have been identified to support e-contract establishment and e-contract fulfillment. In virtual organization domain, there exist different types of virtual organizations. Each of them has different purposes, missions and goals. As an important step in a virtual organization creation process, how e-contracting activities work in different types virtual organization is still blurred. In this article we examine specific requirements of e-contracting activities for different types of virtual organization.

Legal doctrine starts to speak of Inter-systemic electronic contracting, where an important role is played by soft bots, i.e., intelligent software agents, which may be fiction as tools controlled by humans or faced as subjects of electronic commerce, or even seen as legal objects or as legal subjects. The use of software agents in electronic commerce scenarios must be connected with the existence of corporate bodies and Virtual Organizations. The issue to be discussed here is whether there should be Commercial Corporations for the use of Software Agents (as mere tools of the companies) or if the agents themselves can be seen as full and active participants in new types of commercial corporations and Virtual Organizations.

Virtual Enterprises (VEs) use software agents (SAs) to reduce costs, speed up operations, and increase efficiency and competitiveness. Agents can carry out negotiations and make contracts without any human intervention. This makes them useful both in negotiations to set up a VE and in contracting with VE partners. Agents raise legal problems about the relevance and validity of their actions. The law may not always offer a solution to agent-based interactions. This paper investigates whether current laws are suitable to regulating agents and what new rules may need to be introduced.

While decentralized peer-to-peer market platforms are more suited for trading short-lived or non-material goods (e.g., electrical power, bandwidth-on-demand) due to reduced transaction cost, robustness and scalability, they lack the legal certainty provided by centralized electronic market places operated by a trusted third party. This paper presents a technical framework that, conforming to European regulations, provides legal certainty for distributed market platforms. The framework includes a market-consistent data model representing the facts for the legal subsumption process, maps the European framework for electronic signatures to a distributed system, and comprises solutions for both adducing the reception of electronic documents and their distributed long-time storage. Moreover, it includes an electronic legal adviser for an automatic verification of contracts.

The concept of Learning Collaborative Networked Organizations merges both the CNO and the LO paradigms. It aims at augmenting the quality of decision-making and of corporate governance taking inter-organizational knowledge into account. The rationale behind the proposal is that CNOs are still lacking research and work for enhancing their agility where rapid decision-making is crucial for achieving their goals. In this paper knowledge management is proposed as an approach for tackling this problem. The paper presents the first step for a framework for gathering information and for generating new knowledge dynamically according to what users need for given situations. The corporate knowledge is retained, organized, shared and re-used to the benefit of individuals and of CNO as well as of their respective members.

Virtual Organizations (VO) are created from a VO Breeding Environment (VBE) or a network, to serve a specific task. In addition to the task-based value the VO and its participants gain valuable experience and create other types of assets. Most often this achieved value is not saved. It is distributed, not managed and sometimes not even identified. The practise of presenting and reusing the common experience and other non-proprietary assets created in the VO is called here “VO inheritance”. VO inheritance aims to enrich the VBE “bag of assets”, thus improving the preparedness of the VBE for business opportunities. The added value, or the contents of the VO inheritance, is called here “VO heritage”. The paper identifies different forms and components of VO heritage. The identification uses previous development of “lessons learnt” in project management field, and a collection of views of SMEs operating in collaborative networks.

From a practical point of view, this work focuses on pointing out and providing solutions to some of the most common problems that challenge the establishment and keeping of collaborative inter-organisational practices. These problems are grouped into four main intangible factors: trust, equity, coherence and visibility. Due to the changing nature of these four factors, the concept of dynamic interactions is introduced and illustrated. Dynamic interactions among these four intangible factors make more difficult the monitoring and management of possible problems. Then, some solutions to these problems derived from experience are provided.

This paper presents a formal model for a multi-purpose, strategical coordination layer. Based on previous work developed for the RoboCup Soccer simulation, small-size, middle-size, legged leagues and RoboCup Rescue simulation league, a generic coordination model was built that allows the management of collaborative networks of heterogeneous agents. The model uses a multi-level hierarchical approach with the following concepts: strategy, tactics, formations, sub-tactics and roles, from high to low level. Hybrid methods are used to switch formations and tactics. In order to test the model, two strategy instances, for RoboCup Rescue Simulation and RoboCup Soccer, were developed. Strategies are designed with the help of a graphical tool. Results achieved by the team in RoboCup Rescue and Soccer Simulation competitions demonstrate the usefulness of this approach.

With the rapidly growing development of applications in open virtual enterprises, privacy is becoming a critical issue. This paper presents an agent-based architecture that provides coordination services, with special focus on capability-based integration as brokering services. These services take into consideration any privacy desires that may be required from various participants in an open, dynamic, and heterogeneous environment. A proof-of-concept prototype system has been implemented to support and provide information-gathering services in healthcare environments.