OPTIMIZED EFFECTIVE COORDINATION STRUCTURE FOR MULTI-ENTERPRISE NETWORKING

摘要

Two factors are pushing enterprise to evolve much faster in the direction of enterprise network than ever before: one is from the need to compete in an extreme customer oriented market; another is from the increasing requirement from advanced production philosophy such as lean production. Fluctuated and customer oriented market requires manufacturing enterprise has adaptability while lean production philosophy tries to minimize unnecessary cost inside an enterprise. Enterprise network can help solving this dilemma by forming coordination relationship among enterprises. Research problems in this area include how coordination cost should be defined and evaluated; whether there is an optimized enterprise network topology and more important, when the environment factors such as market or factors from inside of an enterprise changes, how the enterprise network can change accordingly. An integrated methodology is developed in this research to model the coordination relationship and to provide a solution to optimize enterprise network topology. The first part of the methodology is focused on enterprise modeling, in which a two level enterprise modeling mechanism is developed. The strategic decision level is modeled by Colored Petri net. Gaussian cube, which originally is developed for distributed computing system, is applied to describe the formed enterprise network because of its scalability and cost justification. In order to model this problem in a mathematical way the costs involved in the enterprise network is analyzed. Several tradeoffs are found. Because of the complexity of the formulated problem, genetic algorithms are applied to achieve its optimal solution. The integrated methodology provides a new way to model enterprise network that might better fit into the future production environment.