Research on modeling method and partner selection for collaborative production of virtual enterprises

To describe and organize collaborative production process of Virtual Enterprises (VE) well, a flexible and extensible modeling method is very important for it. On the basis of analyzing the features of collaborate production process of VE, some meta-models are designed in the paper which contains the main aspects of collaborate production process such as organization mode, work-flow process, distribution of resource and permissions and so on. Each meta-model is formalized by some multi-tuple and can be self-defined and extended flexibly by users and at the same time, ensure the consistency of task execution for the overall enterprise chain in the dynamic environment. To select much appropriate collaborative partners, an evaluation method based on time, cost and consistency is proposed. It uses an approximation of ideal point method to create a objective function and adapts an ant colony algorithm to solve it. The feasibility and validity of the presented methods are verified by experiments. © 2013 Asian Network for Scientific Information.