Virtual enterprises-challenges from a database perspective

Non-hierarchical Regional Production Networks are the vision of a Virtual Enterprise (VE) model followed in a collaborative research project, that has been launched in January 2000 at the Chemnitz University of Technology. The aim of the project is to develop a model that makes small and medium sized enterprises in a region as competitive as large-scale companies. A cooperation of various complementary small VE units, so called competence cells, is considered as a network. This paper sketches the competence cell model and discusses challenges from the database point of view connected with the setup of an IT infrastructure for this model. Two of the fundamental database issues within this scope, besides the modeling of VE units and their relations, are storing the competence descriptions in a database and finding possible units for a given task by approximate matching mechanisms. The semi-structured nature of the descriptions makes them very difficult to handle within traditional database models, such as relational and object-oriented databases. The new concept of semi-structured databases promises to solve some of the problems. An approximate query mechanism is a feature that today's database systems still lack. We propose an AI approach, the Intelligent Cluster Index, to extent database capabilities in this direction.