CHALLENGES OF SOA-ENABLED VIRTUAL ENTERPRISES

Abstract

Objective of this paper is to identify main technological, organizational and sociological challenges of virtual enterprises in context of opportunities for application of Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) for building virtual enterprises collaboration infrastructure. Number of papers and reports are reviewed and four characteristic approaches are presented. It is found that most of research efforts in this area are concept-based and problem-focused, showing lack of holonic, generic approach covering all aspects of business networking. Yet, active development of SOA technologies encourages the industry expectations of universal technical platform for supply chain integration. Three key preconditions for fullfillment of these expectations are: bridging existing gap between enterprise modeling and solution design; provision of dynamic binding of services; and advance in semantic SOA.