The area of virtual organizations, and industrial virtual enterprises in particular, is attracting a large and growing interest both in terms of the research and development and the implementation of new business practices. An ever-increasing number of international projects and national initiatives have been launched recently. Most of the earlier efforts are focused on the development of supporting infrastructures, although more and more initiatives now pursue the exploitation of this concept in business terms. Being a recent research and development area, and in spite of the mentioned interest, there is a lack of a structured and comprehensive text that can be used as a reference source. Most available literature is dispersed in several conference proceedings, journals, and book chapters. This book represents an attempt towards such structured text. Although the book was prepared in the framework of PRO-VE'99, a working conference on infrastructures for virtual enterprises organized by the Esprit project PRODNET II and IFIP, it has the goal of covering more generic VE requirements and addressing several other approaches and important aspects in this paradigm.

Inhalt
I: A Framework for Virtual Enterprises.- 1. The Virtual Enterprise Concept.- 2. Tendencies and General Requirements for Virtual Enterprises.- 3. Federated Information Management Requirements for Virtual Enterprises.- 4. Coordination and Configuration Requirements in a Virtual Enterprise.- 5. Communication Infrastructure Requirements in a VE.- 6. Socio-Organizational Requirements for a VE.- II: The PRODNET Infrastructure.- 7. The PRODNET Goals and Approach.- 8. The PRODNET Architecture.- 9. Design of the Federated Information Management Architecture for PRODNET.- 10. PRODNET Coordination Module.- 11. The PRODNET Communication Infrastructure.- 12. Support for Electronic Data Interchange.- 13. Step Support for Virtual Enterprises.- 14. Production Planning and Control in a Virtual Enterprise.- 15. Product Data Management.- 16. Distributed Business Process Management.- 17. Selection of Partners for a Virtual Enterprise.- 18. The PRODNET Demonstrator.- III: Other Advanced Approaches.- 19. A Framework for Distributed Information Management in the Virtual Enterprise: The Vega Project.- 20. A Design Process Model to Support Concurrent Project Development in Networks of SMEs.- 21. PerDIS: An Infrastructure for Cooperative Engineering in Virtual Enterprise.- 22. SMEs in the Virtual Enterprise LOGSME Enables It Support.- 23. Implementing Internet Enabled Virtual Enterprises Using Collaborative Agents.- 24. Agent Communication for Scheduling in the Extended Enterprise.- 25. A Framework for Improving the Quality of Operation in a Virtual Enterprise.- 26. A Brazilian Case of VE Coordination.- 27. A Virtual Enterprise Model, as Proposed within Project ICIV Aimed at Supporting Networked SMEs.- 28. Supply Chain Management Based on Market Mechanism in Virtual Enterprise.- 29. TheValue System Designer An Infrastructure for Building the Virtual Enterprise.- 30. An Electronic Market Architecture for the Formation of Virtual Enterprises.- 31. Automating Partner Selection for a Virtual Organization.- 32. Definition of a Generic Capability Model for Extended Enterprise Design for Manufacture.- 33. Building the Extended Enterprise on Telework, a Case Study.- 34. Virtual Organisations and the Web Site Resource.- IV: Conclusions and Further Work.- 35. Infrastructures for VE: A Summary of Achievements.- 36. Further Developments in Virtual Enterprises.- Final Acknowledgement.