Virtual enterprises–methods and approaches for coalition formation

The research community, focused on future forms of organisations, has been addressing the challenges involved in the establishment of future collaborative networks of organisations (CNOs). Effective configuration and formation of CNOs require on one hand understanding, detailed capturing, modelling, and design of the components, structure, and behaviour of these environments, and on the other hand analysing their operational functionality and development of needed governing and ICT-based support mechanisms, tools, and systems. Coalitions in forms of virtual enterprises (VEs) and virtual organisations (VOs) constitute special forms of CNOs, which are goal-oriented and have shorter life duration, as opposed to the VO breeding environments (VBEs). VO breeding environments are long term strategic associations aimed to prepare their member organisations for agile dynamic formation of VOs, in response to emerged opportunities in the market/society. Both research and practice have shown in recent times that, besides generating more profit for the organisations, involvement in VOs increases their survivability chance in turbulent markets. Nevertheless, dynamic configuration and formation of effective coalitions in the form of virtual enterprises and virtual organisations involve many unresolved challenges and still an open area of research in need of innovation. This special issue focuses specifically on topics related to methods and approaches for coalition formation, and comprises the extended version of a selection of papers from two prestigious international events of the PRO-VE’07 [www.di.uminho.pt/prove2007] conference held in Guimarães, Portugal in September 2007, and the BASYS’08 [www.basysconference.org] conference held in Porto, Portugal in June 2008. Both the PRO-VE series of conferences that are organised yearly, and the BASYS series of conferences that are organised every other year, are sponsored by the IFIP (International Federation for Information Processing) [www.ifip.org/bulletin/bulltcs/memtc05.htm] and the SOCOLNET (International Society of Collaborative Networks) [www.uninova.pt/ socolnet/joomla]. The main reasons for selecting 12 papers from the above two events for this special issue are briefly summarised below. The PRO-VE conference was initiated in 1999, and today has established itself as the foremost scientific/technical event addressing both the research/academic innovations as well as the industrial business practices in the area of collaborative networks. The PROVE’07 was the 8th international conference of the series, out of which six papers are chosen and extended for this special issue. The BASYS series of conferences started in 1995, and cover a number of complementary topics in relation to collaborative networks, more focused on creating a balance between the human and computer aspects of collaboration. Six other papers selected and extended for this special issue, are from the proceedings of the BASYS’08 conference, the 8th international conference of the series. The BASYS’08 event also hosted and was encompassing a workshop organised by the large integrated project ECOLEAD [http://ecolead.vtt.fi] that was aimed as the final dissemination event