Managing Decisions on Changes in the Virtual Enterprise Evolution Marcus Vinicius Drissen-Silva 1 , Ricardo José Rabelo 2 1 Postgrad. Program of Electrical Engineering, Federal University of Santa Catarina, Brazil 2 Department of Automation and Systems, Federal University of Santa Catarina, Brazil GSIGMA – Intelligent Manufacturing Systems Group {drissen@das.ufsc.br, rabelo@das.ufsc.br} Abstract. VE evolution deals with problems that happen during the VE operation and that put on risk planned results. This requires the application of problem-solving mechanisms to guarantee the construction of a new but feasible VE plan. Grounded on Project Management and Decision Support Systems foundations, this paper proposes a distributed collaborative decision support system to manage the VE evolution. Its main rationale is that VE’s members are autonomous and hence that all the affected partners should discuss about the necessary changes on the current VE’s plan. In the proposed approach, this discussion is guided by a decision protocol, and the impact of decisions can be evaluated. Results of a first prototype implementation are presented and discussed, with a special focus on the part which regulates the argumentation, voting and comparison of possible solutions. Keywords: Collaborative discussion, Decentralized Decision-making, Project Management, Management of Changes, Virtual Enterprises. 1 Introduction Collaboration between companies is an increasing business strategy to face the global competition. Collaborative Networks (CN) offer conditions to companies to reduce expenses, increase capacity, broaden markets and improve themselves with knowledge acquired in business [1]. There are several manifestations of CN. This paper focuses on CNs of type Virtual Enterprises (VE). A VE is seen as a dynamic, temporary cluster of autonomous enterprises that collaborate with each other to attend a given business opportunity or to cope with a specific need, where partners share risks, costs and benefits, and whose operation is achieved by a coordinated sharing of skills, resources, information and knowledge, mostly supported by computer networks [2], offering services abroad as if it were a single organization [1]. A VE is typically organized in a number of phases known as VE lifecycle: creation, operation, evolution and dissolution phases [3]. In very general terms, the creation phase comprises VE planning and partner’s selection; the operation phase comprises the execution and monitoring of the planned activities; the evolution phase comprises the handling of problems detected in the operation phase; and the dissolution phase comprises all issues associated to the VE ending. This paper focuses on the VE evolution phase. It also assumed that companies belong to a VBE (Virtual L.M. Camarinha-Matos et al. (Eds.): PRO-VE 2009, PP. 463-475, 2009. © IFIP International Federation for Information Processing 2009