The PRODNET cooperative information management for industrial virtual enterprises

When designing an IT platform aimed at supporting industrial virtual enterprises (VEs), certain issues related to information management requirements become especially challenging, such as the physical distribution of data, the enterprise autonomy and privacy enforcement, access rights to shared information, and data visibility levels, among others. In the ESPRIT project PRODNET II, a federated database architecture was designed and implemented as the base support framework to effectively manage these issues associated with the sharing and exchange of information in the VE environment. In this paper, first the general information management requirements identified for the VE network in the PRODNET II project are described, and then the challenging design issues behind the development of the components of the federated information management system are presented.