The use of moderators to support collaboration in virtual enterprises offers the opportunity for relevant knowledge held by individual partners to be shared in moderating the behaviour of the VE. However, issues of security and value of knowledge and experience which an individual partner may feel contributes to its competitive advantage also arise. In the VE environment, an individual company may be a partner in several distinct VEs at any one time.
While collaborating with a partner in one VE, each company may also be collaborating in other VEs which are in direct competition with one another: Indeed, the same company may be a partner in two directly-competing VEs. In this configuration, there is clear advantage to all partners in the network of VEs if a moderator specific to each VE can be populated not only with its own knowledge of how it operates, but with access to relevant subsets of each Figure 18. Moderation in VE ramp-up, operation and run-down
partners’ moderator knowledge base, the content of the accessible subset being strictly and clearly controlled by the partner so as to protect confidentiality and competitive advantage.
There is also the opportunity for each partner to access VE moderator knowledge and add to its own knowledge base for future use. This is illustrated in Figure 19.
Other.Future.Research.Areas
As highlighted at the start of this section, the quality of support that a moderator can provide is limited by the quality of knowledge gained through its KAM. To date, all knowledge acquired for the moderators has been provided by human experts. However, huge quantities of experience and expertise lie within the databases of manufacturing operations; hence an important future research area is:
• Knowledge discovery for moderation
The following are unconnected with manufacturing, but still considered to have potential moderator applications and therefore should be examined as future research areas:
• Scheduling applications (e.g., air traffic control, railway timetabling [planning and operations])
• Agent moderation in autonomous agent-based systems
• Pharmacology (e.g., identifying conflicts in medication) Figure 19. Shared access moderator knowledge
Conclusion
This chapter has provided an examination of how moderators, which are specialist intel- ligent software systems, contribute to Business Integration. It has provided a historical journey through changing and increasingly demanding and complex business requirements and business integration requirements, and has demonstrated how the initial single product, single enterprise-based Moderator concept has developed and exploited the increasingly powerful technologies and infrastructures available for business integration. Significant progress has been made since the early days of the first engineering moderator, but as shown in the “Where Next?”section, the challenges to be addressed in the future could be even more interesting.
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Endnotes
1 MOSES: Model-Oriented Simultaneous Engineering Systems—EPSRC Project Number (GR/H24273), 1992-1995.
2 Modelling and Simulation Environments for Design, Planning, and Operation of Globally-Distributed Enterprises (IMS/ESPRIT 29656) 1998 - 2001.