The fast progress in computer networks and their wide availability is complemented with on one hand the "explosion" of mobile computing and on the other hand the trends in the direction of ubiquitous computing. The merger of these technologies acts as a powerful enabler for new forms of highly dynamic collaborative organizations and the emergence of new business practices. Early efforts in the area of virtual enterprises (VE) were strongly constrained by the need to design and develop horizontal infrastructures aimed at supporting the basic collaboration needs of consortia of enterprises. Current trends, however, are more and more directed to the development of new vertical business models and corresponding support tools. In parallel to these efforts, after the first euphoria of the E-commerce wave and the disappointments caused by some simplistic approaches then adopted, there is a shift towards business-to-business solutions, as a way to effectively enable E-commerce. This is therefore a time of convergence of the virtual enterprise and e-business developments.
This book contains selected articles from PRO-VE 2000, the second working conference on Infrastructures for Virtual Enterprises, which was sponsored by the International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP) and held in Florianopolis, Brazil in December 2000. The included articles represent relevant examples of the current state of the art in virtual enterprises and support for electronic business. Together with a diversity of application domains, the emphasis is mostly on: the new forms of virtual organizations; support for agility; modeling and execution of distributed business processes; management of enterprise clusters; distributed/federated information management; knowledge management; logistics for electronic commerce; and safe communication. In other words, the book is mainly focused on the management of business-to-business cooperation in virtual and smart organizations. The implantation of electronic business and the virtual enterprise area is not only a technological problem. Therefore, aspects such as socio-organizational transformations, training needs, legal and ethical issues, and intellectual property rights, are also addressed in the book.