A model to support collaborative work in virtual enterprises Olivier Perrin, Claude Godart LORIA-INRIA-UMR 7503, BP 239, F-54506 Vandœuvre-l es-Nancy Cedex, France Available online 25 January 2004 Abstract Virtual enterprises gather partners distributed in space, time and organizations, in order to achieve a common goal. Their business process realization needs the coordination of their distributed interactions. This paper presents the Synchronization Point model. It provides support for cooperative process man- agement and coordination. It offers pertinent information about work progress while maintaining adequate privacy of information, and supports both long-time transactions and dynamic process definition. Then, its data repository and activity manager helps human interactions in cross-organizational applications. Ó 2004 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. Keywords: Virtual enterprises; Cooperative activity; Coordination; Collaboration; Contracts 1. Introduction Economic pressures (margin erosion, development costs, time-based competition) are placing emphasis on how organizations operate and interoperate with other enterprises to achieve a common business goal [8]. Business-to-Business (B2B) interactions must simply take place, and organizations must work more directly with their suppliers and customers to respond more quickly to changes. At the same time, rapid growth of web technologies is beginning to transform traditional inter-enterprise business models and allows virtual enterprise creation. To enable organizations to adapt to this new business environment, middleware is required for providing dynamic and flexible integration between partners in the value chain. Although new technologies are needed to enable such integration, they have to work seamlessly with both intra- enterprise and inter-enterprise business processes, while maintaining the privacy of information and the autonomy of participants [6,9]. In this paper, we propose a concept that tries to answer these features and the corresponding middleware implementation in the context of Web services. E-mail addresses: olivier.perrin@loria.fr (O. Perrin), claude.godart@loria.fr (C. Godart). 0169-023X/$ - see front matter Ó 2004 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.datak.2004.01.004 www.elsevier.com/locate/datak Data & Knowledge Engineering 50 (2004) 63–86