PRO-VE 2010
11/12/13 October 2010
The 11th IFIP Working Conference on Virtual Enterprises
Presentation
11th IFIP Working Conference on Virtual Enterprise
COLLABORATIVE NETWORKS FOR A SUSTAINABLE WORLD
Steering Committee and Program Committee Chairman: | |
Pr. Luis M. Camarinha-Matos |
Conference Chairman: | |
Dr. Xavier Boucher |
Collaborative Networks emerged a decade ago, as a key issue for Economic growth and a very active area of scientific production. Dynamic collaborative organizations are an essential answer to the increasing need of strong adaptability to a constantly changing economic context. Several collaborative forms such as Virtual Organizations, Virtual Enterprises and other forms of Enterprise Networks, Professional Virtual Communities, or industry clusters and business ecosystems are now supported by large research and business practice communities. These new organizational forms put forth the development of a new theoretical background. In the recent years, many international projects have contributed to these scientific advances. The accumulated body of empiric knowledge and the size of the involved research community provide the basis for the foundation of a new scientific discipline on “Collaborative Networks”. Such discipline is strongly multidisciplinary and thus PRO-VE Working Conference is designed to offer a major opportunity to mix contributions from Engineering, Economics, Managerial or Socio-Human communities.
Collaboration appears essential to achieve Sustainable Development. Sustainability requires conceiving new forms of collaboration at every level of the society. This endeavour emphasizes the multidisciplinary stakes of PRO-VE Conference: the economic dimension of collaborative networks has to adopt an enlarged vision of “territorial economy” where networking is essential; the socio-human focus of sustainable development is strongly linked to recent issues of collaborative networks e.g. on “Active Ageing”, “Social Networks” or “Professional Virtual Communities”; the ecological dimension is also linked to collaborative management of shared resources and large energy systems. New areas and patterns of collaborative behaviors are emerging, not only in industry, but also in the services sector, as well as in governmental and non-governmental organizations. 
Fundamentals of Collaborative Networks such as proper theoretical principles, management of collaboration risks and benefits, new value systems, adequate performance assessment methods, or trust establishment approaches, still represent important research challenges in formulating a sound theory for building inter-organizational collaboration.
PRO-VE, as the most focused scientific / technical conference in the area, offers a major opportunity for the presentation and discussion of both latest research developments and industrial practice case studies. Following the IFIP international mission, the PRO-VE conference offers a forum for collaboration among different regions of the world. This conference continues a series of successful conferences of PRO-VE'99 (Porto, Portugal), PRO-VE 2000 (Florianópolis, Brazil), PRO-VE'02 (Sesimbra, Portugal), PRO-VE'03 (Lugano, Switzerland), PRO-VE'04 (Toulouse, France), PRO-VE'05 (Valencia, Spain), PRO-VE'06 (Helsinki, Finland), PRO-VE'07 (Guimarães, Portugal), PRO-VE'08 (Poznan, Poland), PRO-VE'09 (Thessaloniki, Greece).
IPC Chair welcome message
PRO-VE'10 is the 11th event in a series of successful conferences. Since its first edition in Porto, Portugal, in 1999, PRO-VE has played a fundamental role in the consolidation of the discipline of Collaborative Networks. Along the years, PRO-VE has pursued a number of distinctive characteristics, namely providing a space for lively interactions and discussions of front edge issues, promoting healthy and highly productive interactions among experts coming from different backgrounds on the basis of mutual respect and recognition of the need to have a multi-disciplinary perspective, seeking excellence by supporting a scientific approach to solve real world applications, and thus contributing to sounder theories, methods and tools.
The community built around PRO-VE was the basis for the creation of the SOCOLNET international Society of Collaborative Networks. The continuous support from IFIP, namely through the WG 5.5 COVE, gave PRO-VE a better visibility, namely through the access to the IFIP Proceedings published by Springer and indexed on the Web of Science. In addition to the highly cited proceedings, PRO-VE has also given origin to many special issues of international journals that published extended versions of the best papers presented at the conference.
The main theme for this edition is “Collaborative Networks for a Sustainable World”. Aiming to reach a sustainable world calls for a wider collaboration among multiple stakeholders from different origins, as the changes needed for sustainability exceed the capacity and capability of any individual actor. In recent years there has been a growing awareness both in the political sphere and in the civil society including the business sectors, on the importance of sustainability. Therefore, this is an important and timely research issue, not only in terms of systems design but also as an effort to borrow and integrate contributions from different disciplines when designing and/or governing those systems. The discipline of Collaborative Networks, which has already emerged in many application sectors, shall play a key role in the implementation of effective sustainability strategy.
PRO-VE'10 conference focuses on sharing knowledge and experiences as well as identifying directions for further research and development in this area. Namely, the conference addresses models, infrastructures, support tools, and governance principles developed for Collaborative Networks, as important resources to support multi-stakeholder sustainable developments. Furthermore, the challenges of this theme open new research directions for CNs.
A special word of thanks goes the members of the International Program Committee that carried the heavy task of evaluating the large number of submissions. Finally I also want to express my gratitude for the work of the local organizing committee coordinated by Dr. Xavier Boucher, as well as the great support of the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Mines, Saint-Etienne.
I wish you all a great working conference in Saint-Etienne in the tradition of PRO-VE.
Pr. Luis M. Camarinha-Matos
Steering Committee and Program Committee Chairman
Organizing committee chair welcome message
Bienvenue! Hosting the PRO-VE 2010 IFIP Working Conference on Virtual Enterprises is a real pleasure for the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Mines de Saint-Etienne and especially for our Laboratory for Information Sciences and Technologies (LIST). After Thessaloniki, Poznan, Helsinki and several other scientific metropolises, the city of Saint-Etienne and the ENSMSE are proud to welcome you. We hope your will try out our offer to create some very successful international exchanges.
Putting the focus on “Collaborative Networks for a Sustainable World”, the 11th edition of PRO-VE provides an open and multi-disciplinary forum on the science of Organisation Networking. Indeed, Sustainability can become the vector of such collaboration among various sciences. Hopefully, by involving a large scientific community, PRO-VE 2010 will help to create an effective bridge over the frontiers among disciplines. I would like to take this time to thank all our partners for this organisation: together with the international organizers (Uninova, University of Amsterdam), I’m very pleased with the tremendous contribution of local scientific partners like Université Jean Monnet, Telecom Saint-Étienne or Université Pierre Mendès France de Grenoble. Let me also underline the support of the CNRS National Research Group GDRMACS in attracting new contributions to the conference.
The 11th edition of PRO-VE got a high level of submissions, making possible to be very selective for paper acceptance. We are very grateful to all the authors, who have really contributed to the quality of the Program offered along these 3 days. Of course I would also like to thank the members of the Program Committee for the time and effort they devoted to the reviewing process. Let’s also put forth that the quality of this Conference would really not be possible without the Chair of the Program and Steering Committee, Prof. Luis Camarinha-Matos. He is both the very spirit of PRO-VE and an essential contributor to this 11th edition.
Importantly, we hope you will appreciate the social program. After a welcoming cocktail offered by the local city-hall on Monday October 11th, we will travel back in the artistic and industrial history of the region (Musée d’Arts et d’Industrie, October 12th) before a Conference Gala which will offer the opportunity to discover other historical areas of the city. We hope that you will really enjoy your time with us and leave with agreeable memories of Saint-Etienne and our conference. Thank you all.
Dr. Xavier Boucher
Conference Chairman