Contracting Agency: Advanced Projects Research Agency (ARPA)
Point of Contact: technology@kbsi.com

Overview

Because of the increasingly high rate of change that today’s market demands, agility requires collaboration of multiple enterprises, each contributing its core competencies to a "Virtual Enterprise" (VE). The central problem in the construction of effective VEs is the lack of methods and tools to support the integration of process models from multiple organizations into shared VE processes. The goal of the VE3 project was to provide the languages, software tools, and knowledge bases to enable correct, first-time designs of agile enterprise processes that have predictable performance and are rapidly realizable.

The main product of the project was the "Virtual Enterprise Engineering Environment" (VE3), a groupware-based collaborative process definition, design, and engineering environment that contains a complete set of COTS tools and an integrated model and specification repository for process, information, activity, ontology, and simulation models, as well as the necessary software to support life-cycle cost, Activity Based Costing (ABC), and system dynamics analysis.