Enterprise Innovation

8The Mission Control Room

8.1. Introduction

Virtual enterprises (VEs) provide an environment where flexible production and corresponding service delivery are cooperatively and efficiently carried out by involved stakeholders who are focused on utilizing their core competences.

Value production space (VPS) is an environment which abstracts complex distributed reality of a VE. It considers different layers (e.g. operational, resource layer, etc.) and all the stakeholders involved (e.g. humans, services and machines), directly influencing the factors.

The mission control room (MCR) is the management suite, where the VPS is modeled with conceptual models considering aspects from the aforementioned layers. Moreover, MCR is the tool that offers functionalities by applying mechanisms and algorithms in models to create information values in order to set up a VE, monitor it and assist in its execution.

This chapter aims to introduce application scenarios, concept, realization and user experience of the MCR. Hence, this chapter starts by introducing application scenarios that are based on end-user requirements and are considered to be fulfilled by MCR. Secondly, it discusses the specified concept of MCR based on identified challenges, requirements and issues from application scenarios, and then the approaches and solutions in order to overcome these. Thirdly, it discusses how the MCR is realized and what technologies have been applied. Finally, in addition to a conclusion, user experience ...