Track: Modeling and Simulation

Abstract

To deal with today competitive environment, companies tend more and more to cooperate in Virtual Enterprises where strategies, benefits, skills, resources, costs and risk are shared for a prime amount of time. Virtual enterprise is principally based on Information Technology (IT); its implementation requires modeling approach with a particular focus on business-IT alignment.

Enterprise Architecture seems adequate approach to correctly design virtual enterprise models, however, one of its big challenges is:  How can it redefine itself to deal with the complexity and uncertainty of virtual enterprise? In this paper, we attempt to give answers to this question by evaluating enterprise architecture in virtual enterprise context, identifying improvement areas and exploring several promising domains to address them; our finding is summarized in five hypotheses about requirements of virtual enterprise modeling and supported by a case study of pharmaceutical supply chain.