1 Virtual Enterprise and Corporate Memory Myriam Ribière, Nada Matta INRIA (projet ACACIA) 2004 route des Lucioles BP. 93 06902 Sophia-Antipolis Cedex e-mail: {mribiere, nmatta}@sophia.inria.fr Abstract In Concurrent Engineering, several designers in different fields and from different enterprise col- laborate to build a product. This organization is a temporal organizational structure, called virtual enterprise. In fact, once the project is realized, the virtual enterprise is dissolved, so the deal in such organization is to keep the volatile knowledge. In this paper, we propose a guide to elabo- rate a corporate memory in Concurrent Engineering by identifying the type of memory needed, the contents of memory according to its use during the Concurrent Engineering process. Keywords Corporate Memory, Project Memory, Knowledge Management, Viewpoints, Concurrent Engi- neering. I. Introduction Concurrent Engineering (CE) is a difficult task in which several designers in different fields col- laborate to build a system that satisfy some requirements. Hence, it is important to facilitate teamwork and collaboration between participants in the development process. Learning from past cases can be considered as guidelines to manage problems that occur in CE task, especially in collaborative decision making. So, the need to build a memory of projects appears straightfor- ward for this task. The objective of this paper is to guide in the elaboration of a virtual enterprise memory by estab- lishing the essential knowledge needed during the CE task. The CE organization like all virtual enterprise organization is a temporal organizational structure, where several designers in differ- ent fields and from different enterprise collaborate to build a product. A virtual enterprise mem- ory is a corporate memory that takes into account knowledge of those groups of people. This virtual enterprise memory includes different memory types pertinent for knowledge (know-how) of professions, collective information, and knowledge resources of a CE project (project experi- ences, problem solving expertise, design rationale) [25]. The purpose of this memory is to guide the project realization in reference to profession knowledge and past CE experiences. We based this paper on the CE cycle (the associated task model) (Cf. III) and different typologies of memories proposed in Corporate Memory (CM) (Cf. III. 2) to define an adapted typology of memories and the different possible construction of a memory. Then we analyse (Cf. IV) infor- mation needed during the different tasks and propose also a content description of a virtual enter- prise memory.