A Distributed System Dynamics-Based Framework for Modelling Virtual Organisations

摘要

With advances in distributed computing technology, the idea of a virtual organisation - a network of collaborators whose purpose it is to execute a business model - is now a reality. A core need of any business that conducts operations over a computer network is the availability of systems and tools to support their business process. Many excellent modeling products exist, however these have mostly been tailored to suit co-located planning activities, where group members typically build models within the same "four walls". The aim of this research is to leverage significant developments in distributed computing - XML and .NET in particular - to provide a "plug and play" vendor-neutral distributed framework, which can support dispersed actors in a virtual organisation. The problem used to focus the development efforts is the well-known "beer game". This paper presents the background to our approach, the overall system architecture is also shown, and future work is described.