Recursive Construction and Evolution of Collaborative Business Processes

Virtual Enterprises (VEs) bring together expertise and processes of different companies to react to a market opportunity. Here we propose a novel approach to support the collaborative construction and evolution of such VEs and their business processes, comprising a model of the VE, and a set of model construction rules and operators. Our approach is based on the principles of iterative elaboration, devolved decision-making and situatedness, and achieves flexibility by treating the processes of work, coordination and selection in a uniform manner. We argue that certain assumptions behind existing approaches make them unsuitable to the business practices we observed in the target business ecosystem. We then show how the proposed approach can underpin software support for informal business practices of collaborative process construction by manufacturing SMEs.