Cooperation model in virtual enterprises

Virtual enterprise which is established to satisfy the requirements of market is a one-off, dynamic distributed organization. In a virtual enterprise, partners selected form an alliance to fulfill goals that otherwise can´t be achieved for the limitation of individual´s capabilities. The cooperation among the partners become a key aspect in the virtual enterprise. This paper proposes to use strategic actor based on modeling framework i^* to model the cooperation relationships in the virtual enterprise. The partners are treated as strategic agents and cooperation among them are depicted as dependency relationships. Through dependency relationships, the actors in the model can form a hierarchical and federated architecture and cooperate with each other. Example from a virtual enterprise is used to illustrate.