Heiko Duin

Manuel Oliveira
email: manuel.oliveira@sintef.no

Sobah Abbas Petersen
email: sobah.petersen@sintef.no

Klaus-Dieter Thoben

The Challenge of Learning for Networked SMEs to Increase Competitiveness in Virtual Enterprises

Keywords: Learning, Collaborative Networked Organisations, SMEs, Serious Gaming, Transformative Environments

Collaborative Networked Organisations (CNO) face the same if not even harder problems when trying to transform towards a learning organisation. Small and medium sized organisations -which still represent the motor for job creation in Europe -often respond to market turbulence by engaging in nonhierarchical CNOs such as Virtual Enterprises. A proven method to support learning in distributed set-ups is Serious Gaming, but the question remains whether the application of such tools is equally effective in SMEs compared with monolithic large organisations. In SMEs and networks of SMEs learning needs to move towards contextualised learning and a serious gaming based transformative environments such as TARGET can be used to achieve learning goals and competence development in distributed set-ups. This paper introduces such a transformative environment and highlights the background, its usage, benefits and limitations.

Introduction

In the global market, with the emergent economies, European enterprises have serious difficulties in surviving, let alone excelling, unless they are capable to leverage successfully their capacity to learn and to innovate. Especially, within the knowledge economy, a key survival factor for organizations facing an uncertain turbulent business environment is their ability to change, adapt and evolve, exploring new opportunities as they emerge and drive the organization towards the realization of its full potential. Often, enterprises -and more specific small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) -address emerging business opportunities in Collaborative Networked Organisations (CNOs) such as Virtual Organisation Breeding Environments (VBEs) and Virtual Organisations (VOs) [START_REF] Camarinha-Matos | Collaborative Networked Organizations -Concepts and Practice in Manufacturing Enterprises[END_REF].

However, the willingness to cooperate and the installation of management procedures for the networked organisation alone is not a key for being successful. According to Senge, the only way for organizations to maintain market competiveness is when "people continually expand their capacity to create the results they truly desire, where new and expansive patterns of thinking are nurtured, where collective aspiration is set free, and where people are continually learning to see the whole together" [START_REF] Senge | The Fifth Discipline. The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization[END_REF].

This implied agility and holistic approach requires collaborative design, innovation and learning at all levels of the networked organization, but also converting learning into collaborative action. While being anchored in individual learning, organizational learning means much more than just the sum of the parts of individual learning. Of course, learning as the cognitive process takes place at the individual level, but there is clearly an organizational phenomenon connected with it. Individual learning can be considered organizational when it is done to achieve organization purposes or the learning outcome is shared or among members of the organization and/or network or learning outcomes are somehow embedded in the organizations' systems, structures, and culture [START_REF] Snyder | Organizational Learning Disorders: Conceptual Model and Intervention Hypotheses[END_REF].

Organisational Learning in a Network of SMES faces different challenges coming from being a SME and from being engaged in a Collaborative Network. SMEs often don't have a formalised competence development process. Daily business is in the foreground and learning takes place on-the-job or when there is some time left (which is never planned, but occur occasional). In almost all cases SMEs do not have an explicit budget for learning and competence development. Employees are highly specialised and enterprise culture (including language) can be very specific. If these SMEs are involved in a Collaborative Network additional challenges show up: while all the individuals involved in a Virtual Organisation are specialists in their specific area they may have just a little knowledge and understanding of other areas or the general objectives of their involvement in collaboration. In such a context, collaboration is an essential dimension of the learning process. Working and learning should be interleaved processes in a networked organization. The reduction of cost of learning and to potentially increase work quality makes it necessary to have a smooth transition between work and learning -on individual, organizational and network level.

Besides collaborative learning a participative approach to learning, called also "learner-centred", "constructivism", or "problem-based" is necessary. Such an approach implies active exploration, construction, and active learning rather than the passive attendance at lectures or the reading of textbooks [START_REF] Cristea | Concurrent learning in virtual organisations[END_REF].

Serious Gaming has proven to support learners in acquiring new and complex knowledge and is ideally suited to support problem based learning by creating engaging experiences around a contextual problem where users must apply competences to solve specific challenges (e.g. [START_REF] Duin | A Methodology for Developing Serious Gaming Stories for Sustainable Manufacturing[END_REF]. The advent of serious games has given rise to the possibility of enhancing the learning [START_REF] Freitas | Using games and simulations for supporting learning[END_REF] with an increasing number of advocates promoting the use of serious games as a delivery platform [START_REF] Aldrich | Learning by doing: a comprehensive guide to simulations, computer games, and pedagogy in e-learning and other educational experiences[END_REF] for education and competence development. This effort has been hampered by the perceived lack of concrete evidence concerning the effectiveness of learning and the fragmentation of the research community raises difficult challenges [START_REF] Hauge | Addressing Research Fragmentation in Serious Gaming for Manufacturing[END_REF]. However, gradual well-designed studies begin to emerge demonstrating that learning does take place, albeit it remains debatable if the results can be expounded to cover other learning domains, or even applications, since context plays a key role in how well a person performs a particular activity.

For cases where it is recognized that learning outcomes have been achieved, some argue the result was not derived from intentional pedagogical design [START_REF] Gee | What video games have to teach us about learning and literacy[END_REF]. A special difficulty with the development of entertainment games, the design of serious games is very much a craft, which in the case of serious games is compounded by the challenge of making an engaging game that is "fun", but at the same time, it needs to be "serious" to support situated learning contexts where learners can acquire knowledge, abilities and skills.

The objective of this paper is create awareness for transformative environments as personalized and collaborative learning systems to support competence development of team members which are typically geographically distributed when considering collaborative networked organisations. Such a transformative environment is developed by the EU project TARGET and trialled with three different end user scenarios concerning complex project management, social composition and management of (distributed) teams and the ability to perform a Lifecycle Assessment (LCA) for the whole life cycle of a consumer product. All these scenarios contain the potential to be executed collaboratively in a networked context.

Related Research

Early research in learning in Virtual Organisations focussed on the creation and management of tacit and explicit knowledge assets [START_REF] Steil | An approach to learning in virtual organizations[END_REF]. With moving focus from knowledge management related aspects towards the management of individual and organisational competences, CNO related research focussed on competence management like recent publications from the Pro-VE community show (e.g. Klamma Fazel-Zarandi and Fox (2010) address the problem of competence development through the view of Human Resource Management (HRM). A formal ontology has been developed which allows formal reasoning about competence development problems. Special focus has been set to the problems of identifying the set of skills of individuals, conducting competence gap analysis and testing whether a selected individual matches a given set of competence requirements.

Moreira et al (2010) developed a conceptual framework for the management of organisational competences to contribute to the evolution of business model of an enterprise. Results of their study involving automotive and furniture industry showed that the framework has high potential for ex-ante strategy formulation (strategic planning) and ex-post strategy explanation. "Soft" concepts such as leadership were identified as important with further research needs.

A high-level architecture for personalised learning in CNOs has been presented by Afsarmanesh and Tanha (2010). The authors point out that in collaborative networks the involved individuals are not typical learners compared to academic environments, and therefore it is even more important to make the learning time/cost effective. The personalized learning approach suggested in their paper aims to carefully apply both the learner's and the environment's characteristics into the customization of the most suitable reduced list of Learning Objects, as well as the near optimal learning path.

The efforts presented by these researches mainly focus on the identification of competence gaps on either individual or (inter-)organisational level and how to manage the closing of these gaps. Specific SME related challenges have not been addressed and the acquisition of "soft" skills through a Serious Gaming based approach is not considered in above mentioned research.

There is a need to capture the situation or the work context and to support learning in the workplace or situated learning [START_REF] Lave | Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation[END_REF]). As Fig. 1 says, there is a need to capture context and transform our perceptions of the environment. Working contexts, or work-spaces, can be developed as a set of models which can enable common and role-specific views to be derived and shared, and hence our perceptions will change, and we will learn as work and collaboration progresses (Lillehagen, Krogstie, 2008). SME's often do not have the time or the resources to invest in learning. However, there sustainability is dependent on their ability to adapt to the changing face of business and the needs of their customers in a timely manner. SMEs can benefit enormously from peer learning by having access to the experiences of others either from other SMEs or larger organisations, The ideas of Communities of Interest of Communities of Practice [START_REF] Wenger | Cultivating Communities of Practice: A Guide to Managing Knowledge[END_REF]) can be a powerful tools in designing learning support for SMEs.

Innovative Transformative Environments

In TARGET, the learning process draws heavily from Problem Based Learning (PBL) and Action Learning (AL), resulting in the use of digital interactive stories in a serious game environment that provide situated rich contexts where a learner is required to apply and develop competences to achieve successful outcomes.

The situated contexts captured by Stories represent a scoped business environment where multiple characters are defined with specific roles and responsibilities. Since the paradigm of emergent storytelling is adopted, some of the characters are strategically controlled by Non-Player Characters (NPC) to ensure the Story unfolds with the aim of developing the associated competences. The aim is for the Project Manager to improve his/her competences, such as conflict management, negotiation and communication, through the experiences in the game. So for example, with conflict management, the NPC will control the anti-protagonist to oppose the learner's (e.g. the Project Manager's) goals. However, taking aside these strategic characters assumed by NPCs, the learner may choose which one of the remainder characters to assume in the Story. In the cases where there is more than a single character available for the learner to choose, then it is possible to have multiple learners engaged in the same Story. The fact that a few learners may simultaneously engage with the same Story does not change that learning continues to be individual irrespective of the possibility of learners exhibiting behaviours out-of-character, communicating with one another.

In addition to the virtual business environment provided in TARGET, it also includes an arena for the learners and other users to socialise virtually, called the Lounge". Learners are able to meet other users in the Lounge and access "experiences" (the capture of a learner's experience through the game) of other learners. Capabilities supported in the Lounge support peer learning as well as the social aspects of learning, through ideas such as Communities of Practice and Communities of Interests. The instantiation of the TARGET Learning Process, which is supported by a componentized platform, is illustrated in the diagram of Fig. 1. Each of the stages in that diagram can be characterized as follows:

• Curricula Design. The TARGET Learning Process begins with the learner deciding on what competences to develop. This is done in one of two ways, either goal-oriented or self-directed learning. In the case of goal-oriented learning, the learner defines their current competence profile and their desired learning outcome in the form of outlining their target competence profile. The result of profiling leads to the creation of a learning plan based on custom stories tailored to the particular needs of the learner. Each story captures a business context, which may also involve defined characters with particular roles. The process of creating the learning plan is governed and shaped by a learning strategy that is chosen by the learner. In the case of self-directed learning, the learner builds their learning plan from the experiences of others within the community and these are stored in the knowledge ecosystem. • Briefing. The learner is provided a background to a Story, which gives insight into the context, including the various characters available and their role in the Story. Some of the characters are available to the learner to be played by them, but in many cases the characters are only manipulated by NPCs. • Experience. Whilst engaged with the Story, the system provides an environment where the learner engages with other characters (either controlled by another learner or a NPC) and the environment, enacting their decisions. These decisions will have an impact which will affect and change the situated context of the Story. By monitoring the actions of the learner and taking into account the desired learning outcomes, the TARGET platform makes changes to the Story if necessary. As examples, these changes may be modifying the personality of a NPC to be more confrontational or delaying tasks within a project. • Reflection. The learner is presented with the assessment of their competence during the experience in the form of a timeline manner. The ability of looking back on their decisions by reviewing how the story unfolded whilst crossreferencing the assessment of their competence at each point in time, allows the learner to evaluate their performance leading to reflection. • Peer Learning. The TARGET learning process supports the learner in externalizing the tacit knowledge acquired after their experience of a Story, thereby contributing to the creation of knowledge assets that are uploaded to the Knowledge Ecosystem. Once uploaded, the learning community plays an important role in the process with the support of recognized mentors as facilitators and in discussion with other learners. The social aspects address the need of an ability to deal with flux and instability, and to thrive in situations of flux. Each of the five phases of the TARGET learning process is supported by a set of well-defined services embodied into components that are event driven, thus loosely decoupled from one another with some sharing functional dependencies. This means that the TARGET platform need not be entirely deployed as an integrated solution, but only subsets of the supported functionality. However, one needs to ensure that those components sharing functional dependencies are deployed together otherwise they may be operational at run-time but not work as required.

One of challenges of this approach is to enrich the set of stories or game scenarios that are available for the learners in the TARGET environment. Similarly, to support peer learning, learners or other users need to annotate the experiences that are captured in the system. This is perhaps one of the important aspects of learning support for SMEs where they are able to capitalise on the experiences of their peers, thus saving time and effort that is used in learning.

Conclusions

This paper addresses the challenges of learning and competence development in CNOs, in particular, SMEs. Initiatives to support formalised learning for employees in an organisation have been mostly conducted by larger organisations, while SMEs often do not have the means or the time to engage in such activities. The objective of this paper is to create awareness for transformative environments as personalized learning systems to support competence development of team members which are typically geographically distributed. Serious gaming has proven to be an effective means of supporting situated and contextualised learning within a work environment. We believe that serious gaming will meet the learning needs of SMEs, supporting experiences based learning that is focused to the situation at hand, thus reducing the time and effort that is required to rapidly gain competences in relevant areas. In SMEs and networks of SMEs, learning needs to move towards contextualised learning and a serious gaming based transformative environments such as TARGET can be used to achieve learning goals and competence development in distributed set-ups. This paper introduces such a transformative environment and highlights the background, its usage, benefits and limitations.

Fig. 1 .

 1 Fig. 1. Overview of the TARGET Learning Process

  & Petrushyna, 2010, Fazel-Zarandi & Fox, 2010, and Moreira et al, 2010).Klamma and Petrushyna (2010) used a pattern-oriented approach to manage and develop competences in networked organisations. Pattern recognition is done by applying techniques from Social Network Analysis (SNA). Communities of Practice in an academic environment were the test cases from which a new modelling approach called i* modelling technique has been developed supporting competence development and management tasks.

Acknowledgements

This work has been partly funded by the European Commission through ICT Project TARGET: Transformative, Adaptive, Responsive and enGaging Environment (No. ICT-231717). The authors wish to acknowledge the Commission for their support. We also wish to acknowledge our gratitude to all TARGET project partners for their contribution.


Ekaterina Ermilova
email: e.ermilova@uva.nl

Hamideh Afsarmanesh
email: h.afsarmanesh@uva.nl

Systematic Analysis of Information Management Challenges within Long-term Collaborative Networks

Keywords: Virtual organizations breeding environments, virtual organizations, information management, ontologies

Long-term strategic networks -the so called Virtual organizations Breeding Environments (VBEs) -support their members with formation of virtual organizations (VOs), aimed to address opportunities in market/society. But, both establishment and management of these networks are challenging. On one hand, VBE aims at guiding its member organizations to accumulate/share their abilities and resources and work together as one strong virtual company. On the other hand, attempts to aggregate their competencies and resources to both identify what they can jointly achieve and to represent them as a single strong entity in the market/society. These in turn require support for strong interaction and interoperability among VBE members, as well as preserving interdependencies among their variety of information. This paper systematically analyses the base requirements and describes foundational criteria for modeling and management of information in VBEs. Particularly, it justifies the need for development of a generic unified VBE ontology-based system, in response to the identified VBE information management challenges. Finally, it specifies the main research problem areas and questions. Forthcoming publications will focus on the next steps of this research and how the raised research questions are addressed by our designed mechanisms and developed systems.

Introduction

Last decades have shown that the SMEs' chances of remaining competitive increase when they join forces and work together, e.g. within some new form of organisations called Virtual Organisations (VOs) [START_REF] Camarinha-Matos | Virtual organizations in manufacturing: trends and challenges[END_REF]. As members of the VOs, organisations benefit from combining their resources, capacities and expertise in order to together create a larger / stronger entity in the market/society, and while agreeing to also share their profits and losses. For instance, in the manufacturing sector, SMEs establish VOs so that together they can produce more complex and cost/quality effective products, which they cannot produce individually.

Furthermore, both research and practice in the area of VOs have shown [START_REF] Camarinha-Matos | Elements of a base VE infrastructure[END_REF] a large number of cases where pre-establishing some form of longer-term networks among the SMEs, the so called Virtual organisations Breeding Environments (VBEs), can optimise and facilitate the effective / agile formation and setup of the VOs. VBEs primarily aim to provide a set of required functionalities which on one hand can increase the discovery of suitable market opportunities, identify best-fit partners to address the opportunity, and support the VO formation and establishment, and on the other hand prepare their member organisations in advance of the VO formation, in order to support effective collaboration among them within the established VOs.

In this research [START_REF] Ermilova | Modeling and management of Profiles and Competencies in VBEs[END_REF], we collaborated with a number of existing 1 st generation VBEs from Europe and Latin America. Namely, we studied their current practices, identified their requirements, and deployed and validated our developments in their environments to bring them towards their 2 nd generation.

This article presents the results of our systematic requirement analysis in this problem area. In section 2, the paper describes the variety of knowledge, information, and data that needs to be structured and managed in VBEs, as well as the list of related challenges that prevent VBEs from successful establishment and operation. Section 3 justifies the need for ColOnto -an ontology-based system, designed for responding to the identified VBE's information management challenges. Section 4 addresses the background on ontologies for VBEs. Section 5 lists the main problem areas for research that need to be tackled prior to development of ColOnto, as well as the research questions that are addressed by this research. Section 6 presents the research and development methodology that was followed in this research. Finally, section 7 concludes this paper.

Research Challenges and Justification for VBE-ontology

Rooted in [START_REF] Ackoff | From Data to Wisdom[END_REF], we define the data, information and knowledge of VBEs as follows: VBE data represent some sets of symbols, which are typically held in the cells of the VBE database. As such, these data have no significance beyond their existence and do not have meaning on their own. VBE information represents data that have been given meaning by way of expressing their relational connections, e.g. within the relational database that we develop for VBEs, however this "meaning" does not have to be necessarily useful for the VBE stakeholders. VBE knowledge, on the other hand, represents an appropriate set of collected information and its related context within the VBE, intended to facilitate VBE functionality and its stakeholders. Knowledge accumulated in VBEs should be commonly understood by all its stakeholders, as well as properly formatted and stored in the form of information and data so that it can be effectively processed and analysed.

The data, information and knowledge about VBEs will be gathered from the following two sources: (1) from the generic VBE specification and VBE reference model, which is shared by all VBE instantiations and (2) from the specific domains of activities for this VBE (e.g. metalworking, health-care, etc.). These three types of information/knowledge are illustrated in Fig. 1, and further defined and characterised in this section.

The generic VBE data, information and knowledge addresses the VBE aspects and characteristics that are common to all VBEs. Here, the main types are defined as they already specified by the ARCON reference model [START_REF] Camarinha-Matos | A comprehensive modeling framework for collaborative networked organizations[END_REF]. The main features characterising these knowledge sources include their: (i) Heterogeneity -the ARCON reference model addresses a wide variety of heterogeneous concepts and aspects which comprehensively define VBEs, including the set of eight complementary dimensions of knowledge represented in Fig. 1. (ii) Innovativeness -The generic VBE knowledge specifications addressed in the thesis are new and still need to pass the test of time through their application to different VBEs. (iii) Dynamism -The generic VBE knowledge constantly evolves, caused by the inherent dynamism in the nature of VBE research and development area.

The data, information and knowledge about activity domains address the main processes, products, services, expertise and competencies which are available within a specific VBE domain of activity or business area. The main characteristics of these elements include their: (a) Domain variety -A large number of activity domains already exist, ranging from manufacturing to service provision. (b) Specificity -Knowledge within every domain has a wide variety of distinct elements. (c) Dynamism -VBE domain knowledge goes through a continuous dynamic evolution typically caused by innovation in technology.

Structural dimension

Componential dimension

Functional dimension

Behavioural dimension

Market dimension

Support dimension

Societal dimension

Constituency dimension

-General representation (textual definition) -Specific modelling (UML, Petri nets, causal diagrams, etc.) -Implementation modelling (design, specification, development)

Fig. 1. Variety of data/information/knowledge accumulated in the VBE

The above characteristics entail a number of information-handling-related challenges for the management of VBEs. Our research focuses on four specific highlevel challenges, described below and illustrated in Fig. 2. For each challenge, this figure shows relevant types of VBE knowledge (with solid arrows connecting them), which characterise this challenge and briefly defines a number of aspects related to each challenge.

Structural dimension

Componential dimension

Functional dimension

Behavioural dimension

Market dimension

Support dimension

Societal dimension

Const it uency dimension

-G ener al representation (textual definition) -Specific modelling (UML, Petri nets, causal diagrams, etc.) -Implementation modelling (software tools)

Challenge IV

•Homogeneous representation of all relevant characteristics and aspects of member organizations in the VBE

Fig. 2. VBE management challenges

Challenge I -Establishing common understanding of VBE aspects. Due to innovativeness concepts introduced for 2 nd generation VBEs, there is still a lack of common definition for the generic VBE concepts, which in turn causes the lack of understanding and effective communication within the VBEs [START_REF] Ollus | Towards structuring the research on virtual organizations[END_REF]. In practice, this problem becomes even more severe due to both: (i) the need for merging and interrelation of different types of generic within the VBE and (ii) the continuous and dynamic joining of new members/actors to the VBE, each bringing their own new domain-dependent knowledge to the VBE.

Challenge II -VBE instantiation to different domains. Heterogeneity and dynamism of the VBE knowledge poses obstacles to its instantiation and further extension, since it makes the development, parameterisation and interoperability creation among different VBE software systems more challenging.

Challenge III -Supporting dynamism and scalability of VBEs. Evolving of VBE knowledge also creates obstacles dynamism and scalability, since it requires continuous and fast acquisition, integration and processing of large amounts of new VBE information.

Challenge IV -Balancing and boosting VO involvement. The variety of representation and dynamism in character knowledge related to VBE member organisations pose challenges to their involvement in potential VOs. At present, the lack of homogeneity in organisations' representation in 1 st generation VBEs causes the lack of homogeneity in their chances of being involved in configured VOs. To address the information-handling-related challenges described in the previous section, we suggest the development and management of an ontology for VBEs. Considering the traditional definition of ontology [START_REF] Gruber | A translation approach to portable ontology specifications[END_REF] as: "a specification of a representational vocabulary for a shared domain of discourse", the use of ontology lies at the heart of developing the management system functionalities for the emerging VBEs (2 nd generation VBEs). The VBE ontology can therefore serve as the shared conceptualisation, which needs to be communicated between people and application subsystems. Furthermore, it can provide a base for common understanding among different stakeholders at the VBEs, as well as for creating interoperability among different VBE management tools.

Our research addresses the development of the VBE-ontology a generic and unified ontology for VBEs, called to specifically address Challenges I, II and III. Furthermore, a main part of this ontology focuses on specification of profiles and competencies of the VBE member organisations, which have to be stored in VBEs to support the match-making process for VO configuration. This specific aspect of VBEontology specifically addresses challenge IV mentioned above.

Namely, the VBE-ontology responds to Challenge I through its representation of the VBE related general concepts and domain-related terminology/standards in a detailed and uniform format, so that it can be shared, learned, and commonly understood by a variety of autonomous VBE stakeholders. It responds to Challenge II by serving as a formalized and standardized VBE data model that is useful for development of the VBE databases, and specification of a VBE data classification, also useful for parameterising VBE management tools. Furthermore, it responds to Challenge III through provision of semantics and formalism that support semiautomated management of VBE information (i.e. information extraction from texts and semantic search), and which in turn accelerates the information management processes of the VBEs. Finally, it responds to Challenge IV by providing means for formal and uniform representation of character information related to VBE members, such as their profiles and competencies, which provide similar opportunities for being automatically suggested for selection for VOs, and support balanced involvement of organisations into potential VOs.

In addition to development of the VBE-ontology, we developed the development of a system, called the ColOnto (Collaborative networks Ontology), which is built on top of this ontology. The ColOnto system consists of two main modules, namely:

(1) a conceptual part, consisting of the VBE-ontology and (2) the functional part consisting of the set of functionalities required for the VBEontology maintenance and management.

Research Background, Problem Areas, and Research Questions

Although the need for ontology development and management to support Collaborative Networks and VBEs is identified in previous research [8] [9], in 2005 this area of research was still at its early stages. A small number of existing publications in this area, which are closer to our work, have mainly focused on the following three topics:

• An empirical development of an ontology for VBEs. An early attempt to address an ontology for VBEs is presented in [START_REF] Plisson | The CNO Ontology Page[END_REF]. This ontology is developed empirically and includes a narrow sub-set of the VBE related top-level concepts.

• A sub-ontology for specific VBE management subsystem. An ontology for VBEs' Performance Indicators (PIs) and VBEs' Collaborative Opportunities (COs) called "PI and CO Ontology" is presented by [START_REF] Baldo | An ontology-based approach for selecting performance indicators for partners suggestion[END_REF]. The main concepts of this ontology include: "PI", "CO", "Organisation", "VBE", "VO", "Performance requirement" and "Measurement objective".

• Ontology library for VBEs. In [START_REF] Simoes | Ontology Engineering in Virtual Breeding Environments[END_REF] the concept of an Ontology Library System (OLS) addressed by [START_REF] Ding | Ontology Library Systems: The key to successful Ontology Re-use[END_REF] is adapted for VBEs. The OLS is defined as "an important tool in grouping and re-organising ontologies for reuse, integration, maintenance, mapping and versioning".

In relation to our profile and competency partition of the VBE-ontology, while there was a significant number of research publications addressing the general topic of competencies of people, mainly within the human resources management area, there was a limited number of research addressing competencies of organisations, especially within the context of organisations' networking, including: • Organisation "competency models" for VBE members. In [START_REF] Molina | A Virtual Enterprise in Mexico: From Concepts to Practice[END_REF] a competency model for "clusters of manufacturing organisations" is addressed, which aims to support the automation of the VO formation from this cluster. The introduction of this model was the first step towards competency-based supporting for boosting VO creation, but the model is not generic enough to be adapted to the variety of different VBEs.

• Requirements for "competency management" in VBEs. In a number of past research [START_REF] Afsarmanesh | A framework for management of virtual organizations breeding environments[END_REF] [16] [START_REF] Vallejos | A framework to create a Virtual Organisation Breeding Environment in the mould and die sector[END_REF] the need for competency management functionalities for VBEs is identified. However, while some of these functionalities are identified in previous research, they are not further specified or developed.

• Profile and competency management in existing VBEs. A few existing VBEs handle digitised profiles and competencies of their members [START_REF] Ermilova | Modeling and management of Profiles and Competencies in VBEs[END_REF]. Furthermore, while every VBE stores profiles of their members, which represent a variety of characteristics about their member organisations, only a few of them store some details about competencies of their members.

The overview of the research background demonstrates the significant gaps existed in areas of ontology management for VBEs. Particularly, we have identified a number of open problem areas, including: 1. Systematic design and development of the VBE-ontology. A systematic approach to design and further development of the VBE-ontology needs to be defined and applied while answering the following questions: Should there be one VBE-ontology or a set of ontologies? Which areas of VBE related knowledge and information should be addressed by ontologies? Should the VBE ontologies be formal or informal? Etc.

Maintenance and evolution functionalities for VBE-ontology.

The VBE-ontology needs to continuously evolve, reflecting the new findings in the VBE area of research and well as the changes in existing VBEs due to market and society changes. Four specific functionalities have been already defined for this purpose as follows: Ontologies library; Collective development of ontologies; Semi-automated ontology discovery; and Semi-automated integration of related ontologies.

VBE ontology-based management functionalities.

A number of ontology-based functionalities need to be developed to support the VBE through its entire life cycle from its creation stage to its dissolution stage, aimed mainly at coping with the large amounts of information to process, and at accelerating the VBE management operations. The following main functionalities are already identified as required for VBEs: Establishing of common understanding; Instantiating VBE to different domains; and Supporting dynamism in VBEs. 4. Ontology visualisation. Most ontology interfaces typically locate ontology classes through their hierarchical (i.e. subclass-superclass) relationships with other classes. However, such location is often not convenient or user-friendly for the human VBE actors who want to learn about the entire network of VBE concepts and the relationships among them (e.g. including part-of relationships).

In relation to the profile and competency partition of the VBE-ontology, open problem areas of research include the following: a. Establishing unified/generic models. The profile and competency models included in the VBE-ontology need to be generic in order to suit every VBE, regardless of its application area. b. Continuous update of profile data. In today's dynamic market, a large number of an organisation's characteristics, such as their resources (human, machinery, etc.), position in the market, financial status, organisation's aim/strategy, details of its products, associated partners etc, are also not static and are subject to changes at different times during the life time of the organisation. c. Maintenance and management of VBE profiles. The profile and competency models should satisfy their purposes, namely supporting the VBE management functionalities/operations, which are mainly aimed at boosting VO creation. d. Generic competency naming. With the lack of standards for naming the competencies in different domains, it is clearly challenging for VBEs to specify and describe their competencies. Nevertheless, the problem of naming and developing taxonomy for the existing and emerging competency names in different domains and applications is outside the scope of our research and remains an open area. e. Cataloguing competencies. Classification of the wide variety of existing competencies in the world, even if limited to a specific domain and application area is still challenging. So far, there are no standards defined for classification of competencies, and every day new competencies emerge in many domains and application areas.

Based on the analysis of the research problem areas described above, we state the main general research question (GRQ) as follows:

GRQ. Can we effectively specify an ontology for Virtual organisations Breeding Environments (VBE), as well as develop semi-automated ontology-based support functionalities for VBEs such that they respond to the challenges of: (1) establishing common understanding of aspects for all VBE stakeholders, (2) creating VBEs in different domains, (3) handling VBE dynamism and scalability and (4) facilitating the boosting and balancing of organisations' involvement in potential VOs?

This research question is further refined into three more specific questions RQ1 to RQ3. In the RQ1, we address the definition task of VBE-ontology and particularly introduce the definition of the profile and competency models within the VBEontology.

RQ1. Can we identify the scope and the elements of ontology encompassing the wide variety of VBE related entities and concepts so that it represents the diversity of its subspaces, addressing all endogenous elements and exogenous interactions, and specifically the subspace of profile and competency management?

In RQ2, we address both the logical and the physical organisation of the VBEontology. Particularly we introduce the way in which this organisation responds to identified challenges for VBE-ontology development. Furthermore, we exemplify the specification of the VBE profile and competency models within it. serve as prototypes of the VBE-ontology management system -Ontology Discovery and management System (ODMS) and Profile and Competency Management System (PCMS). PCMS focuses of management of a specific part of the VBE-ontology devoted to VBE member organizations' profiles and competencies. One screen-shot from the PCMS is illustrated in Fig. 3. It demonstrates a user interface for viewing profile model, which is based on the profile and competency sub-ontology.

Conclusions

This paper motivates the need for applying ontologies to the design and management of information in running Virtual Organizations Breeding Environments (VBEs), as well as those VBEs that are currently passing through their establishing phases. Particularly, it aims at consolidation of motivation for development of an ontologybased system called ColOnto for information management in VBEs. Therefore, it first addresses the main challenges for information management in VBEs that can be solved by using ontologies. It further addresses research on management of ontology in VBEs, and the main research questions that need to be tackled for development of ColOnto.

As such, this paper describes the results of a systematic analysis of the base requirements and the foundational criteria for modeling and management of information in virtual organizations breeding environments (VBEs). While some specific aspects of the raised research questions are addressed in our earlier publications [START_REF] Ermilova | Competency modelling targeted on boosting configuration of Virtual Organizations[END_REF], other forthcoming publications focus on systematic addressing of all specified research questions..

Fig. 3 .

 3 Fig. 3. Screen-shot from the PCMS's user interface for viewing VBE profile model

RQ2. Can we capture, organise and specify the large set of diverse but interrelated aspects identified in RQ1 in the VBE-ontology, considering both their evolutionary nature and the heterogeneity of their sources?

In RQ3 we address the required ontology management functionalities to be developed on top of the VBE-ontology. These functionalities are mainly divided into two main groups. Namely the functionalities for maintaining the VBE-ontology itself, and VBE-ontology-based support functionalities. The second group of functionalities is specifically aimed at supporting profile and competency management in VBEs.

RQ3. Which set of functionalities are needed to maintain (e.g. discover, engineer and integrate) the continuously evolving VBE-ontology, as well as the semi-automated management needed of the information supported through the VBE-ontology?

Research & Development Methodology and Achievements

The methodology followed to design and develop the ColOnto system for VBEs consists of six main steps divided into three main groups of "Input", "Approach & Development" and "Validation": Input -complete background analysis needed for development of ColOnto:

Validation -validating correctness of the ColOnto system:

Step 6: Validation of the ColOnto system. The ColOnto system for VBEs, addressed in this thesis, is validated through a number of empirical and rational approaches.

Both the conceptual and the functional parts of ColOnto introduced in section 3 of this article are developed. The VBE-ontology is built up in OWL. Currently it is represented by: (1) the complete meta-level, (2) the complete core level, and (3) domain level for the metalworking sector. The concepts for the domain level are provided from the existing 1 st generation VBE from Mexico called IECOS (www.iecos.com). On the physical level the VBE-ontology represents set of filesone for every developed sub-ontology. Two software applications are developed to


Patricia Macedo
email: patricia.macedo@estsetubal.ips.pt

António Abreu

Luis M Camarinha-Matos

Modelling a Collaborative Network in the Agri-food Sector using ARCON Framework: The PROVE Case Study

Keywords: Collaborative Networks, modelling framework, ARCON, agriculture sector, case study

PROVE network is an agri-food network that aims to enable small farmers to sell their goods directly to consumers resulting from this exchange benefits to both parties. This network was selected to apply the ARCON Modelling Framework in order to evaluate its appropriateness to represent this kind of collaborative networks. Starting with a brief presentation of PROVE, this paper presents a systematic representation of the network using the ARCON framework. Furthermore a discussion about the benefits, challenges and difficulties found in our experience of applying ARCON to this kind of network is presented.

Introduction

In the last decade, the increasing globalization of markets has caused profound changes in global economy. Collaborative networks appeared as a way to face some of the challenges introduced by globalization. There are high expectations that collaborative networks bring clear benefits to its members [START_REF] Abreu | Understanding Social Capital in Collaborative Networks[END_REF], [START_REF] Abreu | Towards a methodology to measure the alignment of value systems in collaborative networks[END_REF]. These benefits include an increase of the "survival capability" in a context of market turbulence, but also the possibility to better achieve common or compatible goals. On the basis of these expectations are, among others, the following factors: joining of complementary skills and capacities, access to new / wider markets and new knowledge, etc. However, in spite of these positive expectations, it is also frequently mentioned that there is a lack of published cases that clearly shows the benefits of such organizational form, which is an obstacle for a wider acceptance of this paradigm. Therefore, this work intends to present a real collaborative network and analyze its characteristics. This case study is based on a Portuguese network in the agri-food sector, the PROVE initiative. This network can be framed in the scope of the alternative agri-food networks (AAFN) [START_REF] Volpentesta | A Collaborative Network Model for Agrifood Transactions on Regional Base[END_REF], and its aim is to support the development of collaborative processes enabling small farmers to sell their goods directly to consumers, and it already supported the creation of several local networks in distinct regions of Portugal.

Most of the published collaborative networks cases [START_REF] Ferreira | The workflow-enabled supply chain, the Civil Construction Enterprise case study[END_REF][START_REF] Garita | A case study of VO education in Costa Rica. Virtual Enterprises and Collaborative Networks[END_REF][START_REF] Botarelli | The Virtual Development Office framework for business Networks: a case study from the Umbrian packaging district[END_REF][START_REF] Volpentesta | Networking agrifood SMEs and consumer groups in local agribusiness[END_REF] do not follow any specific structure, what implies that: (i) some relevant aspects of networks are not explicitly identified; (ii) for the reader it is more difficult to observe a specific characteristic in the network description; (iii) it is harder to comparatively analyze two networks. In order to overcome these difficulties, the ARCON [START_REF] Afsarmanesh | The ARCON modeling framework[END_REF] modelling framework, which has been proposed to capture the various aspects involving the representation of Collaborative Networks, is adopted in this case study. There are already a few published cases of modelling collaborative networks using ARCON, such as [START_REF] Beckett | Active Ageing: Using an ARCON Framework to Study U3A (University of the Third Age) in Australia[END_REF][START_REF] Baldo | For a methodology to implement virtual breeding environments: a case study in the mold and die sector in Brazil[END_REF], and all these cases suggest that ARCON is a useful modelling tool to guide the process of describing and analysing the studied collaborative networks.

The aim of this paper is to present a case study of a specific Portuguese collaborative network in the alternative agri-food sector and to discuss the appropriateness of the ARCON modelling framework to represent this kind of collaborative networks.

ARCON Overview

ARCON [START_REF] Afsarmanesh | The ARCON modeling framework[END_REF]) is a modelling framework that addresses the complexity involving the representation of CNs. The modelling framework divides this complexity into three dimensions in order to cover all relevant aspects of the Collaborative Networks (CNs) in terms of life-cycle stages, environment characteristics, and modelling intent. Vertical dimension: Life-cycle stages -This perspective captures the diversity and evolution of CNs during their entire life cycle. Horizontal dimension: CN environment characteristics -This perspective includes two subspaces: the internal or endogenous characteristics as well as the external or exogenous interactions that are related to the logical surrounding of the CN:

• Endogenous Elements subspace represents the CN from the inside, four subdimensions are proposed: (i) the structural dimension; (ii) the componential dimension; (iii) the functional dimension; and (iv) the behavioural dimension • Exogenous Interactions subspace represents the CN as seen from the outside, with a focus on the interactions between the CN and this environment; four subdimensions are defined: (i) the market dimension; (ii) the support dimension; (iii) the societal dimension; and (iv) the constituency dimension. Diagonal dimension: Modelling intent -This perspective is related to different intents for the modelling of CNs. Three layers are considered: (i) The general representation layer that includes the most general concepts and related relations, common to all CNs regardless of the application domain; (ii) The specific modelling layer that includes more detailed models focused on different classes of CNs; and (iii) the implementation modelling layer that includes models of specific CNs.

The PROVE Network Case Study

In the last decade, the increasing globalization of markets has caused profound changes in the local farming [START_REF] Feenstra | Local food systems and sustainable communities[END_REF]. The advances in the means of transport and communication, and the improvement of quality of life were the main causes of these changes. As a result, there was a greater exchange of goods and services, which allow access to almost all agricultural products. Nowadays, indeed, we easily find for sale any kind of fruits and vegetables, regardless of the month of the year or the place where we are. Consequently, the result of these changes brings a devastating effect for small local farmers, who do not have access to the market due to their lack of competitiveness in terms of market prices and accessing to distribution channels [START_REF] O'hara | Global food markets and their local alternatives: a socioecological economic perspective[END_REF]. This environment leads to abandonment of rural activity and in consequence the farming land. As a consequence, the region loses products and services essential to its sustainability and social and economic regeneration, creating serious imbalances in terms of population and regional resources. In order to ensure the sustainability and/or increase the "survival capability" of the region, it is necessary to stimulate farmers, entrepreneurs and service providers for new business models and ways of working [START_REF] Higgins | Building alternative agri-food networks: Certification, embeddedness and agri-environmental governance[END_REF]. In this context, the development of collaborative processes that enable small farmers to sell their goods directly to consumers resulting from this exchange a benefit to both parties was the strategic approach that motivated the PROVE network (PROVE 2012).

Fig. 1 -Farmers Network life-cycle

The PROVE network initiative can be classified as being an alternative agri-food network where the business model adopted is the direct-sale based on box-schema [START_REF] Bosona | Box-Scheme Based Delivery System of Locally Produced Organic Food: Evaluation of Logistics Performance[END_REF]. Its main purpose is to increase the negotiation power of farmers with local actors involved directly or indirectly in the business activities of the small farmers, stimulating and reinforcing local business capability of these farmers and promoting the development of a close relationship between farmers and consumers The PROVE initiative is nowadays implemented in the following regions: Sesimbra, Palmela, Lousada, Penafiel, Paços de Ferreira, Montemor-o-Novo, and Mafra. In order to support management activities and ensure the sustainability of the network some ICT tools were developed and several rules related to governance and polices were defined. Fig. 1 shows the life-cycle of a PROVE local network. At the creation phase the local promoter select a set of farmers (such as 3 to 5 farmer) and creates a PROVE network in the target region. During the operation phase, the farmers meet weakly and plan product baskets according to customers' orders and products' season. On the delivery day, the farmers prepare the baskets and make their distribution in the selected locations. In the following week the farmers meet to divide the money from the previous week and start again the process of organizing baskets. However, during the operation phase, new farmers can join the network, and others may go out.

Modelling PROVE using the ARCON Framework

In this section, ARCON is used in order to characterize and understand in a systematic way the main dimensions of the PROVE network. Fig. 2 shows the main perspectives of the ARCON framework, which are described below in tables. Following ARCON framework the proposed model belongs to the Specific Modelling Layer, since this layer includes detailed models focused on specific classes of CNs. (ii) Process orders functions, which are the responsibility of farmers and are performed weekly and include calculating the quantities of each product per basket and per farmer, based on the fruits and vegetables available for this week and the existing orders.

(iii)Accounting functions, which include: (i) setting of the basket price and products price; (ii) purchasing new baskets; and (iii) dividing the money according to the agreed norms. Control Activities functions, which are the responsibility of the Facilitator/Promoter, and include the organization of periodic meetings that serve to monitor the marketing process and to be aware of the main Farmers difficulties.

E

The functions that belong to this phase are: (i) integrating new farmers (each new farmer accompanies all the operational activities for a certain period, just as an observer); (ii) re-planning the logistics weekly; (iii) updating the list of available vegetables and fruits to the consumer.

(continue) Endogenous Elements (Endo-E) subspace

Behavioural

E4

C

The policies and governance rules that drive this phase are:

• The Facilitators and Promoters should be aware of the region's opportunities and challenges. • The Facilitators and Promoters should have complementary professional competences. • Facilitators should have competences in the area of promoting the relationship between consumers and farmers.

O

Legal and Fiscal Duties of Farmers:

• Each farmer has to contribute with vegetable products from its farm whenever possible.

• The Farmers have to use sustainable production practices.

• Each Farmer has to coordinate its production with the others Farmers in order guarantee variety of products to consumers. • The elaboration of the basket should follow hygienic principles, and all the products must be fresh. • The Farmers should comply with the local and time agreed to deliver the baskets.

• Each Farmer should improve the landscape of its farm and should encourage visits from consumers. • Each Farmer contributes actively to the work group, and participates in promoting activities.

Legal and Fiscal Duties of consumers:

• The consumer buys the basket previously ordered, accepting that the products available are seasonal. • The consumer should respect the local and time agreed for the delivery.

• The consumer should pay in money the basket to the Farmer at the time of the delivery.

• The consumer should be sympathetic with Farmers, in respect with stock ruptures due to weather constraints.

Productions and Basket Preparation Rules

• All the orders' sheets should be available 2 days before delivery date.

• All the products that compose a basket should be traceable. Farmers should keep registers from production in order to guarantee product traceability. • In each basket preparation, Farmers should satisfy the preferences of the consumers.

E

The principle that drive the integration of new members is:

• During two weeks each new member must join a Farmer, in order to follow the working process, from production to delivery of the baskets.

According to the ARCON model the Exogenous Interactions subspace represents the PROVE network as seen in interaction with the outside, with a focus on the interactions between the PROVE network and its environment. Four sub-dimensions are defined: (i) Market Dimension, which covers the issues related to interactions with "customers" and "competitors"; (ii) Support Dimension, which covers the issues related to support services provided by third party institutions; (iii) Societal Dimension, which covers the issues related to interactions between the PROVE network and the society; (iv) Constituency Dimension, which focuses on the interaction with the universe of potential new members of the PROVE Network. Table 2 presents a short description of the elements identified as belonging to the ARCON's exogenous subspace.

Exogenous Elements (Endo-E) subspace

Market I1

C

Communication strategy to customers: (i) The PROVE network is represented by a logo (ii) A web page which describes the process guidelines.

(iii) An attractive leaflet to reach the customers not covered by the Internet.

(iv) Advertising campaigns in newspapers and local radio stations.

O

Interaction with "customers" and stakeholders: (i) A web page that supports a FAQ (Frequently Asked Question) service to (ii) Meetings between Farmers and consumers.

(iii) Weekly newsletter.

(iv) Demonstration activities in schools.

E

Interactions related to admission of new members into the network: (i) Carry out a visit to the farming land of the potential new member with the purpose of establishing an exploratory contact.

(ii) General meeting between the potential new member and all other members in order to identify common interests.

Support I2

C

Main third party institutions that support the network creation are:

ARCON Application Assessment

One of the goals of this study is to discuss the advantages of using ARCON as a modeling framework to describe a CN with the characteristics of PROVE. PROVE is a network with a low level of complexity and involves a low number of members. In spite of this fact, the use of ARCON, allows us to structure in a systematic way an amount of disperse and unstructured information, and to identify some hidden gaps. Fig. 3 illustrates the mapping in the ARCON framework of the gaps described below. A1. The use of ARCON allowed to notice that the dissolution phase is not covered. All the formal documents provided by the PROVE network do not cover any item related to the process of disintegration of a PROVE local network. For instance it is not defined: (i) how to manage the cessation of baskets supply; (ii) how to manage the tangible (baskets, vehicles, etc.) and intangible (consumer contacts, consumer profiles, etc.) networks assets.

A2. The use of ARCON allowed to make a clear distinction between executable operations and governance rules that drive PROVE's local network behavior. In fact, based on the information collected during this study we realized that members (Promoters, Facilitators and Farmers) were unaware of the difference between operation and governance rules. Furthermore, during the documentation analysis, we realized that the description of governance rules were mixed with the description of the work flows.

A3. The use of ARCON allowed concluding that the iteration between the network and society is not well defined for each life-cycle phase. In fact, based on the information collected during this study we realized that it is just possible to have a broad description of the relationships between the network and the local community. Several important items to characterize this issue are missing, such as: (i) types of relationships with external actors; (ii) evolution of relationships over the life-cycle; (iii) assessment of PROVE impact in society.

A4. The use of ARCON allowed realizing that the analysis of the potential iteration with new members is missing. In fact, based on the information collected during this study we concluded that promoters had not addressed some relevant issues of this dimension, such as: (i) definition of mechanisms to interact with local farmers in order to identify potential new members for the PROVE local network; (ii) identification of the various transactions types with public institutions over the lifecycle phases.

Conclusions

The globalization created an increasingly turbulent and competitive environment for agri-food sector. In this dynamic environment, farmers cannot afford to resist the market change and should abandon the beliefs and ingrained methods of work. As never before, today's farmers must develop new methods and competences to competing in a global market. However, to improve the sustainability of this management approach, structured models and methods should be applied. The use of a reference modelling framework in order to support the representation of the complexity of an alternative agri-food network can be an advantage. In this work, ARCON was used in order to represent in a systematic way the PROVE farmers' network. From the application of ARCON, a set of relevant issues about the PROVE network were identified, such as: (i) Dissolution phase was not specified, by the PROVE managers; (ii) There is not a clear distinction between executable operations and governance principles; (iii) Some relevant interactions are not clearly specified (e.g. between PROVE and society; and between PROVE and new members).

This case study illustrated the benefits of applying a reference modelling framework to specify and analyse this kind of collaborative networks. Nevertheless, in order to enable the use of the ARCON framework by end-users, and in this way promoting the use of formal methods in collaborative network management, it is important to develop a full practical software tool. Such software tool should aim to support the process of capturing the elements required to fill in the ARCON cells, and to provide reasoning mechanisms to analyze the obtained models.

  planning phase, which includes the visit of the promoter to potential farmers and their farming land in order to identify and characterized the region in terms of: (i) type of available goods, (ii) type of production. (ii) Consortium formation phase, which includes: (i) farmers and mediators searching; (ii) promoting meetings in order to explain the business idea to the potential partners; (iii) farmers and mediators selection to form the network. (iii) CN Lauching phase, which comprises the specification of the logistic process, comprising three main activities: (i) defining the workflow to compose the baskets with fresh vegetables and fruits and assignment of responsibilities (ii) choosing what of type of basket will be used; and (iii) defining the rules to divide the profits and to contribute to the common expenses. (iv) CN set up phase, which includes: (i) customization of the G-PROVE software system to support the network; (ii) acquisition of the first set of empty baskets to prepare the first orders; (iii) implementation by the promoter of some marketing actions in the respective region. O (i) Operational functions, which are the responsibility of farmers and are related to farming activities.

Fig. 3 -

 3 Fig. 3 -PROVE local network gaps

Table 1 -

 1 Endogenous Elements subspace for the PROVE network.Network Components: (i) Human Resources: Individuals that belongs to the Promoter's organization, Facilitators and Farmers that belong to the network. (ii) Knowledge: Manual of best practices to manage PROVE networks. (iii) Technology: G-PROVE software (supports operation).

				Endogenous Elements subspace
	Sructural	E1	C (i) Promoters; (ii) Facilitator; and (iii) Farmers.
				Network Components: (i) Human Resources: Individuals that belongs to the
			C	Promoter Organization. (ii) Knowledge: Manual of best practices to manage
				PROVE networks.
	Componential	E2

O (i) Facilitator; and (ii)

Farmers. E (i) Facilitator; and (ii) Farmers (members of the network and new members who join the network).

O E

Network Components: (i) Human Resources: Individuals that belong to the Promoter's organization, Facilitator, Farmers that belong to the network and also potential new members (Farmers). (ii) Knowledge: Manual of best practices to manage PROVE networks.

Table 2 -

 2 Summary of Exogenous Interaction subspace for the PROVE network.

  Stimulate the development of new value-creating activities in the region.

				• Local Authorities
				• NGOs
				• Local Development Associations
				• Institute of Employment and Vocational Training
				Main third party institutions that support the network operation are:
				• Local Authorities
			O	• NGOs
				• Local Development Associations
				• Institute of Employment and Vocational Training
				Main third party institutions that can also support the network during evolution are:
				• Confederations and associations of producers
			E	• Cooperatives of Producers • Agri-food Companies
				• Agricultural Service Providers
				• Consumers associations
	Societal	I3	C PROVE network contributes to: • Increase the competitiveness of rural communities; • Provide a positive interaction between rural and urban population; • O E
	Constituency	I4	C This interaction is done essentially through the promoters: • Visiting farmers • Promoting meetings to explain the business idea to the potential partners • Following agreed norms.

O E

Acknowledgments -This work was supported in part by the FCT-MCTES -"Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia" (CTS multiannual funding) through the PIDDAC Program funds.


Amihai Motro

Yun Guo

The SOAVE Platform: A Service-Oriented Architecture for Virtual Enterprises

Keywords: Service-oriented architecture, virtual enterprise, collaborative network, peer-to-peer transactions, production trees

The flexibility and reusability afforded by service-oriented architectures seems to be of singular applicability to the management of virtual enterprises. In this paper we describe the architecture of the SOAVE platform: a Service-Oriented Architecture for Virtual Enterprises. The platform provides the members of a networked community with a set of tools with which they can collaborate on the production of complex products. It allows members to perform enterprise management functions, as well as manufacture enterprise products collaboratively by means of peer-to-peer transactions.

Introduction and Background

A virtual enterprise is a coalition of business entities who collaborate on the manufacturing of complex products. The collaboration is often ad hoc, for a specific product only, after which the virtual enterprise may dismantle. The members of a virtual enterprise possess complementary skills and technologies whose combination is deemed necessary for the target product at hand [START_REF] Camarinha-Matos | Brief historical perspective for virtual organizations[END_REF].

Web services are distributed, autonomous, platform-independent software components, often limited in their functionalities, but easily available to other applications through standard protocols, thus hiding implementation details from their consumers. Service orientation is an approach to software design that accomplishes more complex functionalities by integrating such services. In recent years, the Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) has gained considerable popularity, notably for achieving architectural flexibility at low cost [START_REF] Erl | Service-oriented architecture: concepts, technology, and design[END_REF].

A closer look into virtual enterprises and service orientation reveals that these two approaches complement each other nicely. Service-oriented architectures are particularly attractive for virtual enterprises for several reasons:

• Reusability. Virtual enterprises are typically created for specific products, and are dismantled once these products are no longer in demand, a process that potentially incurs high overhead. With a service-oriented architecture, existing services may be reused, allowing new virtual enterprises to be set up at low development cost. Cost is of particular concern to virtual enterprises, as often they involve small or medium size companies, for whom the cost of building and maintaining customized applications could be prohibitive. • Flexibility. A key advantage of virtual enterprises is their agility: the capacity to adapt rapidly to changing market circumstances [START_REF] Goranson | agile virtual enterprise: cases, metrics, tools[END_REF]. The loosely coupled nature of services in a SOA allows applications to easily evolve with the changing requirements. New services can be incorporated and old services can be dropped to achieve the desired enterprise model. • Interoperability. By using standard protocols and technologies, service-oriented architectures support interoperability between clients and services. This is particularly valuable for virtual enterprises, because they bring together independent business entities possibly operating on heterogeneous platforms.

In this work, we describe the SOAVE platform: A virtual enterprise architecture built on the principles of a service-oriented architecture. There have been numerous interpretations of the virtual enterprise paradigm, and ours is derived mostly from the VirtuE model [START_REF] D'atri | VirtuE: a formal model of virtual enterprises for information markets[END_REF]. Similarly, from the numerous interpretations of service-orientation, we adopt two fundamental principles: (1) A relatively small number of services is defined; and (2) enterprise work is carried out with a set of business processes, where each business process "weaves" basic services into a complex task, with minimal amount of traditional programming. Perhaps the most salient feature of SOAVE is that it provides a formal framework for virtual enterprises architected in accordance with the service orientation paradigm. This framework defines basic concepts, algorithms, transaction protocols, business processes and services to implement collaborative manufacturing of complex products. It formalizes concepts such as product price, product complexity, time-todelivery, procurement risk, reliability scores, on time vs. late delivery, and failure.

Related Work.

In the past five-six years there has been increased interest in implementing virtual enterprises with service-oriented architectures. Much of the work is concerned with particular industries but of more relevance to our effort here are projects that describe industry-independent architectures, and we discuss here three such projects. A model of virtual enterprises based on service composition is proposed in [START_REF] Zhou | An adaptive model of virtual enterprise based on dynamic web service composition[END_REF]. However, the authors interpret a virtual enterprise simply as a composition of services, and the focus is on locating and selecting the appropriate services. In contradistinction, we view a virtual enterprise as a network of business entities, and a service is a software component that assists these entities in performing their work. The virtual enterprise architecture described in [START_REF] Cui | A service-oriented architecture of virtual enterprises for manufacturing industry[END_REF] provides for several layers and a multitude of modules performing a variety of functionalities. But although some components are labeled "services", the architecture does not conform to the service-orientated paradigm in which complex tasks are achieved by compositions of basic services. The interpretation of both virtual organizations and service orientation assumed in [START_REF] Danesh | A framework for process management in service-oriented virtual organizations[END_REF] is more in agreement with the current literature. The authors propose a detailed framework for process management in serviceoriented virtual organizations. It consists of multiple layers, and is based on common standards and protocols. In contradistinction, our work here is not concerned with massive software infrastructure as much as with the formal analysis of the fundamental concepts of setting up (and scaling down) collaborative groups, constructing complex products by procuring components from peers, and the flow of collaborative manufacturing with its aspects of risk, failure and recovery.

Section 2 reviews the virtual enterprise model: the basic concepts, the supporting information system and the workflow. Section 3 focuses on the architecture: the business processes, the shared services and the peer-to-peer communications. We conclude in Section 4 with a brief discussion of some of the remaining work.

The SOAVE Model

SOAVE provides a formal framework for collaborative manufacturing, in which basic concepts, algorithms, protocols and metrics can be defined and analyzed.

The Basic Elements: Members Making Products

A marketplace is a set of networked business entities that are available for participation in virtual enterprises. Any member of the marketplace can launch a new enterprise; the member then becomes the enterprise catalyst. The catalyst invites other members to join the enterprise; each member then becomes an affiliate and launches a division. Each marketplace member is associated with a reliability score that denotes its performance. This score is updated after each collaboration.

The catalyst establishes and maintains the set of products that the enterprise will manufacture collaboratively. These include both end products to be available to outside clients -the essential purpose of the enterprise -as well as interim products to be available only to affiliates to use as components in more complex products. Collaborative manufacturing implies that each product is a root of a tree of components: the internal nodes of the tree are composite components, and its leaves are elementary components. Each node is associated with the affiliate chosen to deliver it, and each edge indicates a procurement transaction. Only the catalyst receives and delivers external orders. Thus, it is associated with the root of every tree.

Product Versions and their Properties

The same product may be offered by different affiliates, thus providing procurement alternatives. An offering of a product is called a product version. While versions are identical in substance, they are distinguished by six properties:

1. Price: This is the purchasing price of the version. It is the purchasing price paid to other affiliates for procuring the necessary components, plus a profit markup determined by the affiliate offering this version. 2. Time: This is the promised time to delivery (the interval between the time of ordering and the time of delivery). It is the maximal time to delivery of its components, plus time spent locally to manufacture the product. 3. Risk: This is the risk that the product will not be delivered as promised. It combines the risk associated with the procurement of its components and the reliability of the offering affiliate. The precise calculation of risk is elaborated later, and for now we denote it as a function θ of the underlying risks.

4. Expiration: This is the time when this version will expire. It is not later than the minimal (soonest) expiration time of the components. 5. Depth: This measures the length of the longest path (procurement chain) in the manufacturing tree of this version. 6. Complexity: This measures the number of nodes in the manufacturing tree.

Formally, consider a product version P with components P 1 , …, P n which is manufactured by affiliate A. Then )ܲ(݁ܿ݅ݎܲ ≥ ∑ ܲ(݁ܿ݅ݎܲ ) ୀଵ

(1)

Time(P) ≥ max ଵஸஸ ܶ݅݉݁(ܲ ) (2) Risk(P) = θ (Risk(P 1 ), …, Risk(P n ), Risk(A)) (3) Expiration(P) ≤ min ଵஸஸ ܲ(݊݅ݐܽݎ݅ݔܧ ) (4) Depth(P) = max ଵஸஸ ܲ(ℎݐ݁ܦ ) + 1 (5) Complexity(P) = ∑ )݅ܲ(ݕݐ݅ݔ݈݁݉ܥ + 1 ୀଵ (6)
Under this scheme, an enterprise may offer a product version that requires a long time and carries with a high risk, but has a low price; another version that requires a short time and carries a low risk, but has a high price; and so on. Note that an affiliate can take advantage of new sourcing opportunities available to it, by offering a new version, and on expiration withdraw the older version. As can be seen in inequalities (1), ( 2) and ( 4), an affiliate may set Price higher than the cost of procurement, to include profit; it may set Time higher than the maximal procurement time, to include local manufacturing; and it may set Expiration sooner than the lowest expiration. Risk Calculation. Risk(P) is defined as the probability that the affiliate A would not deliver the product P as promised. This could happen either because A did not receive any of its components P i as planned, or because A itself failed. Hence, it combines Risk(P i ) and Risk(A) (the latter is the complement of the reliability score of A). In the product tree, it is convenient to view affiliate failure as node failure and procurement failure as edge failure. In general, it cannot be assumed that the n + 1 components of Risk(P) are mutually exclusive (i.e., it may not be assumed that there is at most one failure) and, Risk(P) must be calculated according to De Moivre's inclusion-exclusion principle [START_REF] De Moivre | Doctrine of chances -a method for calculating the probabilities of events in plays[END_REF]. In practice, however, unless n is small, it is impossible to calculate Risk(P) in this way, and one must settle for lower and upper bounds, such as those suggested by the Bonferroni inequalities [START_REF] Bonferroni | Teoria statistica delle classi e calcolo delle probabilità[END_REF]. If we assume that the n + 1 events are independent (i.e., the failure of a node and the failure of each edge are unrelated), then, using a simplified inclusion-exclusion formula [START_REF] D'atri | Virtual enterprise transactions: a cost model[END_REF], Risk(P) may be calculated from the risks (i.e., reliability scores) of the affiliates associated with the production of P. Confirming intuition, Risk(P) increases with the complexity and depth of P.

The Enterprise Information System

The virtual enterprise information system is based on nine database tables, arranged in three tiers. Tables 1 and2 are external: they are the only tables available outside the enterprise. Tables 3, 4, 5 and 6 are global: they relate to the entire enterprise (they are mostly managed by the catalyst) and they are available to all the affiliates of the enterprise. Tables 7, 8 and 9 are local: they relate to individual divisions (each division stores and manages a "horizontal slice"). Database keys are underlined. The relationships among these tables are monitored by various foreign key constraints (not shown). Many of the attributes have already been discussed. The attributes are similar to those of Orders.

Regular Workflow and Irregular Behavior

Collaborative manufacturing begins when a client consults the Public table for the available product versions and their essential parameters (Price, Risk, Time, and Expiration) and sends an Order message to the catalyst for a particular product version. After verifying the validity of the order, the catalyst acknowledges it with an order number and sends an Order message to the manufacturing affiliate. The affiliate launches a production: It consults the product's Plan, which describes the components necessary and their chosen providers, and sends the providers Order messages. When all orders have been fulfilled, the affiliate assembles the product and sends a Delivery message to the ordering affiliate (presumably with an invoice and shipment tracking information). The ordering affiliate acknowledges (with payment information) and proceeds to assemble its own product. This continues until the catalyst receives the finished product, which it sends to the client, who responds with payment. This workflow assumed smooth, fault-free operation. In practice, however, various things could go wrong. We identify three basic types of irregular behavior. The business processes are defined to manage these behaviors appropriately.

At times, an enterprise must be scaled down: The catalyst may want to withdraw a product, terminate an affiliate, or dismantle the enterprise altogether; similarly, an affiliate may want to withdraw a product version, or dismantle its division. The preferred way for scaling down is to perform these activities gracefully; for example, before quitting, an affiliate waits until all its offerings expire, and then satisfies all pending orders. However, at times, scale-down may be abrupt rather than graceful. For example, an affiliate may decide to quit instantly, withdraw products before expiration, refuse new orders, and cancel orders that were accepted from others or issued to others. In such cases production trees are "disconnected" at a particular node with delivery cancellations propagating up the tree all the way to the root. Another type of irregular behavior is lack of response during production exchanges among affiliates. An affiliate does not acknowledge an order, does not fulfill an order that has been acknowledged, or does not acknowledge a delivery (with payment). In these cases a similar disconnection in the production tree is detected (after a time-out period). This results in a similar wave of delivery cancellations. A third type of irregular behavior is lack of response during management exchanges between catalyst and affiliate; for example, not responding to invitation or termination notices.

The SOAVE Architecture

We describe a particular platform, yet it is important to note that the architecture allows deviation from this configuration, by customizing the business processes and the services that they deploy. SOAVE provides each marketplace member with the necessary tools to (1) launch a new enterprise as a catalyst or join other enterprises as an affiliate, (2) perform management functions, and (3) perform day-to-day operations (collaborative manufacturing of products). All members have identical configuration (clones), allowing them to function as catalysts or affiliates in different enterprises. The catalyst does not manufacture -it only supervises and leads. Possibly, a regular affiliate could be co-located with the catalyst.

The platform is based on three concepts: business processes, services, and messages. Each member has access to an identical set of business processes that perform management functions and day-to-day operations. These processes involve limited "internal logic" and most work is performed by a collection of predefined services, available from a single service repository. Members are able to communicate with each other as necessary, using a fixed set of message types.

Business Processes

Presently, SOAVE defines 13 processes for either management or production.

Management Processes. There are six global-level processes for catalysts and five local-level processes for affiliates. The global processes are: launch a new enterprise, dismantle an existing enterprise, invite a new affiliate, terminate a current affiliate, offer a new product, and withdraw a current product. The local processes are: launch a division, dismantle a division (quit), offer a new product version, withdraw an expired product version, and renew an expired product version.

Production Processes. There are only two production processes: (1) External order processing is executed by catalysts; it describes the process that begins with an Order message received by the catalyst from an external client, and ends with the catalyst delivering the product to the client. (2) Internal order processing is executed by affiliates; it describes the process that begins with an affiliate receiving an Order message from another affiliate, and ends with the affiliate delivering the product.

Services and Messages

The aforementioned business processes require frequent access to the enterprise information service, to look up information and to update it. Of the 13 services presently defined in SOAVE, nine are dedicated to servicing requests for each of the nine database tables. They create or destroy tables, search and retrieve information, and modify their contents. We focus here on the other four services.

Optimization service. This service is called by the business process for offering a new product version. It receives a product version from the affiliate, locates the corresponding plan devised by the affiliate, and finds the best procurement options for the plan components. The optimization parameters are cost, risk, time complexity, depth and expiration. The service can perform two types of optimization. [START_REF] Bonferroni | Teoria statistica delle classi e calcolo delle probabilità[END_REF] The affiliate sets limits on all but one parameter, and the service finds the procurement that optimizes the remaining parameter; for example, search for the best price, while not exceeding specific risk or time. [START_REF] Camarinha-Matos | Brief historical perspective for virtual organizations[END_REF] The affiliate defines a weighted combination of the parameters, and the service finds the procurement that optimizes it.

Expiration service. This service is called when an enterprise is launched. It monitors the Availability table for expirations. When a product version expires, it nullifies Price, Risk, Time, Depth, Complexity and Expiration, and notifies the affiliate. When an affiliate receives an expiration notice, it could either withdraw the version (delete the Availability row), or re-optimize it (update the row).

Performance-tracking service. This service is called by the catalyst upon the completion and delivery of each external order. When the values in the relevant row in Orders maintain Dtime -Rtime > Time, the order was delivered late. However, it remains to be discovered which affiliate on the production tree introduced lateness and which affiliate simply propagated lateness. By examining the global Orders table and local L_Orders and Plan tables, the service can assess the performance of each participant and adjust its Reliability scores accordingly. Recall that these scores are used in future calculations of risk.

Failure-tracking service. This service is called by the catalyst upon the receipt of a delivery cancellation (see Section 2.5). By examining the global Orders table and local L_Orders and Plan tables, the service can detect the affiliate responsible for the failure and adjust its Reliability score accordingly.

Messages. Finally, SOAVE provides templates for five message types. Invite and Terminate are sent by the catalyst to affiliates, and Quit is sent by an affiliate to the catalyst. Order and Delivery are exchanged between affiliates to launch and complete procurement transactions. The acknowledgement of Order includes an order identifier and the acknowledgment of Delivery includes payment information.

Future Work

A pilot implementation of SOAVE has been completed, showing the viability of the overall approach and pointing where the platform could be strengthened. Work is underway to extend the platform in different directions, and we mention here only two important extensions.

Performance indicators and triggers. One of the most salient features of virtual enterprises is their agility: The ability to adapt and transform the enterprise according to market behavior. In SOAVE this is accomplished with the help of performance indicators [START_REF] D'atri | VirtuE: a formal model of virtual enterprises for information markets[END_REF] -statistics that are collected from the information system while the enterprise is operating; for example, the average turnaround time from order placement to fulfillment; the ratio of late deliveries; the affiliates with highest failure rate; the most severe bottlenecks in the production process, and so on. These performance indicators are deployed to trigger new business processes. For example, when an affiliate receives too many orders for a product, a new member would be invited with similar manufacturing capabilities; or when an affiliate misbehaves (for example, has a high ratio of failed transactions), it would be terminated.

Constitutional rules. Constitutional rules [START_REF] D'atri | VirtuE: a formal model of virtual enterprises for information markets[END_REF] are constraints that must be enforced throughout the life of the enterprise. With the use of constitutional rules, virtual enterprises of different "flavors" may be formed; for example, rules can be used to regulate the extent of affiliate autonomy or the degree of competitiveness within an enterprise. Constitutional rules can be specified as semantic constraints on the database tables (and on the performance indicators that are derived from them). Violations of these rules can be avoided by blocking the violating activity, or they may trigger a compensating business process. For example, assume a rule that a product cannot be offered in too many versions; when a business process attempts to offer a new version, it would be blocked.

1 .

 1 Marketplace (Member, Reliability, Description): The community of potential members available for participation in virtual enterprises. Member identifies the member and Description provides information on its manufacturing capabilities. 2. Public (Product, Version, Price, Risk, Time, Expiration): The public product catalog for placing external orders. Product and Version identify the product version. (Public is a view of Availability that shows only end products.) 3. Catalog (Product, Description): The products of the enterprise. Product identifies the product and Description is a textual description of the product. 4. Directory (Affiliate, Reliability, Description): The enterprise affiliates (including the enterprise catalyst). Directory is a subset of Marketplace. 5. Availability (Product, Version, Affiliate, Price, Risk, Time, Depth, Complexity, Expiration): The product versions presently available throughout the enterprise. Affiliate is the (unique) manufacturer of the product version. 6. Orders (Order, Product, Version, Affiliate, Price, Risk, Time, Depth, Complexity,

Expiration, Rtime, Dtime, Status): A log of the orders received by the enterprise. Order is a unique identifier. Rtime and Dtime are the times the order was received and delivered. Status is "in progress", "completed" or "failed". The other attributes are the values published in Availability at the time of the order. 7. L_Availability (Product, Version, Price, Risk, Time, Depth, Complexity, Expiration): A view of Availability with versions from a particular affiliate only. 8. Plan (Product, Version, CProduct, CVersion): For each version offered by this affiliate, the component products it requires and the versions to be procured. 9. L_Orders (Order, Product, Version, Price, Risk, Time, Depth, Complexity, Expiration, Rtime, Dtime, Status): A log of the orders received by this affiliate.

This paper is dedicated to the memory of Alessandro D'Atri, who introduced me to the subject of virtual enterprises.