SAT – Collaborative Organizations

Collaborative Organizations manifest nowadays in a large variety of forms both in industry and services. Examples include virtual enterprises, extended enterprises dynamic supply chains, collaborative virtual laboratories, collaborative e-government, virtual institutes, etc, and related collaborative organizations such as virtual organization breeding environments, professional virtual communities, virtual teams, etc. All these forms resort to computer networks and collaborative platforms to support joint work among autonomous and geographically distributed entities. A large body of empirical knowledge in the area is already available and current efforts are directed to build the theoretical foundation in parallel with a wider dissemination of the new paradigm. As a result, a new scientific discipline of Collaborative Networks emerged. The objectives of this SAT are to contribute to the development of the theoretical foundation, promote reference models and best practices, develop new methodologies and approaches, and promote education.

Luis M. Camarinha-Matos - Committee Chair

New University of Lisbon

Prof. Luis M. Camarinha-Matos is currently head of the Robotics and Integrated Manufacturing Group at the New University of Lisbon. He is also the leader of the Collaborative Networks and Distributed Industrial Systems (CoDIS) research group at the UNINOVA institute. He has participated in many international and national projects, both as a researcher and as a project coordinator. Currently he is the scientific director of the FP6 integrated project ECOLEAD, a major European initiative on collaborative networks. His main areas of current research include: virtual enterprises, virtual organizations, and professional virtual communities, coordination and workflow for distributed business processes, remote training and virtual labs, multi-agent systems, intelligent manufacturing systems, systems integration, machine learning in supervision. He has been involved in the organization and program committees of many international conferences, has edited various issues of Journals and books, and he has more than 265 publications in Journals and conferences proceedings. He started the series of conferences BASYS (on balanced automation systems) and PRO-VE (Infrastructures for Virtual Enterprises) and is the founder and president of the international Society of Collaborative Networks (SOCOLNET) as well as the chairman of the IFIP Working Group on Virtual Enterprises. He is also founder and current chairman of the IFIP WG 5.5 on virtual enterprises.