VE architect-driven partner selection: ontology-based approach

An underlying formation of instant virtual enterprises (VE) is the matter of flexible and efficient partner selection. In rapidly changing business environment and turbulent market conditions, selecting the partners for (re)configuration of VE must be realised regarding many factors such as skill, cost, resource, availability, goal, etc. However, these attributes primarily are not constant and may not be appropriate for some networks or conditions; hence they should be instantly replaced with some new ones. This imposes a demand that the VE architect selects partners in terms of changing criterion. Thus, we have to establish an adaptable and flexible partner selection mechanism that is driven by the VE architect's requirements. To achieve this, the paper proposes an ontology-based partner selection algorithm to effectively calculate the semantic similarity between VE architect's requirement ontology and partners' ontologies. The algorithm comprises diverse metrics including gravitation of resources (GoR), path similarity, path weight, and definition similarity which make it more close to VE architect. The paper also discusses implementation and evaluation of it using different approaches which confirm the quality, efficiency, and generality of algorithm.