A REVIEW ON ENVIRONMENTS SUPPORTING VIRTUAL ENTERPRISE INTEGRATION Maria Manuela Cunha [nstituto Politecnico do Cavado e do Ave, Portugal, mcunha@ipca.pt Goran D. Putnik Universidade do Minho, Portugal, putnikgd@dps.uminhopt Jose Dinis Carvalho Universidade do Minho, Portugal, jdac@dps.uminho.pt Paulo Avila [nsrituto Politecnico do Porto, Portugal, pavila@dem.isep.ipp.pt Since the mid nineties, a considerable effort have been undertaken to develop environments to support the Virtual Enterprise life cycle. This effort includes the development of technologies and the development of applications either at the academia or at industrial level to facilitate supply chain management GIld virtual enterprise integration and its reconfigurability dynamics. In the paper we intend to present those main contributions, viewing the creation of an environment for the effective and efficient integration of virtual enterprises. We also present the model 0/ the Market 0/ Resources, proposed by the authors, as an electronic brokerage service, designed with this purpose, and discuss its benefits/ace to other developments. 1. INTRODUCTION The goal of the enterprise is to fulfil the customer requirements. Traditionally, the enterprise uses the set of resources existing inside its walls. As this selection domain is relatively limited and of small size, it cannot, in general, provide the desired competitive performances, the enterprise searches for cooperation with other enterprises, corresponding to a shift from "self-centred closed-enterprises" to "global open-enterprises" (Browne & Zhang, 1999). Several factors determine the competitiveness of the enterprise, being the most important requirements for competitiveness, the fast adaptability or fast reconfigurability to environmental change (Cunha, Putnik, & Gunasekaran, 2002). The paradigms satisfying those requisites are the Agile and the Virtual Enterprise ones, which, in the context of the present work, will be designated as the Agile/Virtual Enterprise model (AN E), corresponding to the Virtual Enterprise model offering the characteristics of the Agile Enterprise. © Springer Science+Business Media New York 2002 V. Mařík et al. (eds.), Knowledge and Technology Integration in Production and Services