A transactional approach for cross-organizational cooperation

Due to the popularization of Internet, virtual enterprises are expected to become commonplace on the Web. The concept of virtual enterprise depicts the idea that many applications are the result of cross-organisational cooperation between several actors, playing different roles, who build a relational system which is structured by a common objective. Virtual enterprises can be short- or long-lived. The objective of our work is to develop a framework to install and to support cooperation between the partners of a virtual enterprise, with a particular focus on concurrent engineering applications, and especially on codesign activities. We have chosen a transactional approach which releases programmers from the burden of interaction programming, and this approach has been implemented in a distributed manner using a cooperation model requesting a partner to negotiate cooperation patterns with its direct neighbours.