Research On The Task-oriented Virtual Enterprise Establishment And The Key Problems

Virtual enterprise (VE), the primary organizational mode for agile manufacturing (AM), is the distributed dynamic alliance of partner firms with different core competences, connected through information technology, sharing knowledge, technology and resources for better fulfillment of the market opportunities.The organization, operation and management of a VE are centered on the overall task and aimed at task accomplishment. And the task-oriented VE life cycle is a process including task determination, task planning, task operation and task completion. However, previous researches neglected the task-oriented property of the VE, focusing only on the VE organizational formation, coordination, operation and disaggregation perspective without considerations of specific task characteristics, and could not provide satisfactory solutions to many problems. The task-oriented perspective leads new directions for VE research, presents feasible solutions to issues irresolvable only from organization perspective, and brings additional requirements as well.The innovative contents of the paper are as follows:(1) A task-oriented establishment and management framework throughout VE life cycle is presented.(2) A task-oriented VE establishment process, including procedures of task decomposition, task analysis, task planning and task allocation, is studied with the introduction of VE subtask value coefficient and performance evaluation indicator.(3) A VE partner selection method based on WBS (work breakdown structure) is put forward with an adaptive GA (generic algorithm) solution method.(4) A task-oriented VE organizational structure model is investigated, and the evolution, formation and modeling of VE organization are studied from thetask-oriented perspective.(5) A task-oriented partner trust relationship management method based on subtask characteristics and interdependency between subtasks is presented.(6) The dynamic VE profit allocation process is studied and a profit allocation method based on WBS and cooperative game theory is given.