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ther participants is omitted in this first step but each
affected participant directly succeeding the delayed
work package receives a message with a request to
check the own planned end time based on the new
replanned start time
2
. This procedure may result in
an analog failure propagation, repeating the proce-
dure until the GANTT chart is up-to-date. Information
about delays can also be used to precisely calculate
company specific reliability indices to characterize a
company objectively, integrally motivating the partic-
ipants to actually update their scheduling contempo-
rary. To realize this in a valid way, it is necessary to
count and measure actual faults by this company. This
is possible by inventing failure tags, classifying fail-
ures in a scheme which is readable for the software
system as, e.g., machine breakdown, delay(s) of pre-
decessor(s) in the cooperation, or delay(s) at suppliers
or subcontractor(s) for the own work packages.
This scheme can be augmented easily, which is
not of importance here. Besides a fair calculation of
reliability indices of the participants, this paves also
the way for a few other functionalities. If somebody
states delay(s) of predecessor(s) as reason for the de-
lay, this is only plausible if there is a delay of prede-
cessors, which can be checked automatically by using
the same feature for the predecessors. Furthermore, if
the predecessor(s) retract their delays (which may be
possible), the participant can be inquired if the orig-
inal schedule can be recovered. This is the currently
implemented way to handle distributed replanning.
6 CONCLUSIONS & PROSPECTS
The paper introduced different approaches to cooper-
ation generation, discussing their strengths and weak-
nesses. Further, we introduced an intelligent support
system to manage enterprise cooperations which has
been implemented as web-application. Finally, re-
planning strategies have been discussed. Note, that
we had to leave out many details in our description of
the system and the algorithms here.
Currently, the methods are evaluated under practi-
cal conditions in a beta-test phase with selected com-
panies. From a research point of view we proclaim
substantial progress towards a practically applicable
solution of the problem of cooperation generation but
as described above, there are still issues and disad-
vantages no matter which of the presented approach-
es one chooses for realization. This means there re-
mains still a lot of work for the future: There are
2
The start time itself cannot be influenced by him, be-
cause if preceding participants are delayed, this can be seen
as a fixed constraint.
e.g. open problems dealing with work package split-
ting or a subsequent negotiation of bid prices.
Further possible extensions of the introduced
strategies are, e.g., the integration of procurement for
purchased parts, better support of rush orders, and ad-
dressing functionalities for a ERP/PPS integration.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The authors thank the German Academic Exchange
Service for funding their research.
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