Research on engineering change management in virtual enterprise

The virtual enterprise (VE) is a new type of enterprise organization. It needs cooperative work supported by a computer network, where some new characteristics and new problems that are different from traditional manufacturing models emerge. The engineering change in a VE is distributed and often needs parallel treatment. To control change effectively and treat it in parallel, a method that uses a change propagation graph to analyze change implementation, and a change process model based on a Petri net were presented in the paper.