Technologies to Support the Market of Resources as an Infrastructure for Agile/Virtual Enterprise Integration

Abstract

The Agile/Virtual Enterprise (A/V E) model is considered a highly dynamic version of the Virtual Enterprise (VE) model, and its implementation presents several requirements in order to keep the VE partnership aligned with the market, i.e., with business. Such requirements include (1) the reduction of reconfiguration costs and effort, and (2) the capability to preserve the firms’ private knowledge on products or processes. These must be assured by a specific environment, or, in other words, by organizational infrastructures as a meta-organizational structure for VE design (or integration) and operation, such as the Market of Resources – an environment developed by the authors to cope with the highlighted requirements, and assuring a better performance than the traditional environments such as the Internet search engines or the electronic marketplaces. The Chapter describes the functionalities of the Market of Resources and explains how does it supports A/V E integration, and addresses some technologies that could support A/V E integration within the Market of Resources, namely XML/ebXML and Webservices. The Chapter proposes an architecture to support the operation of the Market of Resources, representing a fusion of the peer-to-peer (P2P) architecture with the client-server architecture, as a variant of P2P architecture. Also, a laboratory implementation of the web services for manufacturing is presented too.