Research On The Portal-Strategy-Based And Grid-based Approaches To Design Virtual Enterprise

Virtual Enterprise (VE) is not only an important organizational mode to enable Agile Manufacturing, but also a strategy for individual firm to obtain and integrate outside resources in the dynamic business environment. In this paper, VE design methodology, which is a significant and basic topic in the VE field, is focused.Firstly, given the state-of-the-art of VE design methodology domain - short in maturity at the micro-level and vacancy at the macro-level, the paper has analyzed the VE design requirements, and then improved object-oriented method to an innovative design technique - portal strategy - in the enterprise entity design context. After that, the application details of portal strategy in the VE design have been discussed parallel from micro- and macro- perspectives, and the micro- and macro- VE model, namely VEP (Virtual Enterprise Portal) and CCP (Common Community Portal), have been generalized.Furthermore, architectural and implementation aspects of VEP and CCP are detailed. For VEP, through the the study of the case, which is adapted from NIIIP-based SPARS SC, its superiority of portal strategy (in VEP, compared with other traditional approaches) has been demonstrated; For CCP,through the demonstration of its data integration realization, the strengths and weakness of portal strategy (in CCP) have been revealed.Thirdly, through analysis, this paper points out one critical element, which decides the behavior of VE paradigms in reality, is the used VE design method. Then, the shortcomings of current VE design techniques, namely that they can not compromise at the efficicent and dynamic ends, have been revealed. Based on that, the foreground of portal strategy has been further exhibited. Finally, grid-based VE design approach has been explored. First, the limit of traditional VE design techniques, namely the default settings they take that individual enterprise entity is the basic design unit and unable to be further divided, has been breakthroughed by the introduction of grid-based perspective. The concept ofEnterprise Grid (eGrid) is extended from computational grid, and the concept of Grid Enterprise (GE) has been further presented. Second, the operation mechanisms and portal-strategy-oriented model to enable GE are detailed. Finally, as a response to the requirement for VE realization with regard to the GE symantics, the possibility and inevitability of the evolution from traditional enterprise to grid enterprise are discussed.