A formal theory of BM virtual enterprises structures

Abstract

Formalisms are a tool commonly used in many engineering areas and, as expected, are also being used on virtual enterprises research. However the use of formalisms is not enough to ensure correctness and ambiguities absence on the developed projects. Only with a background formal theory is possible to achieve that goal. This paper presents a formal theory of the structural aspect of virtual enterprises according to the BM_Virtual Enterprise Architecture Reference Model (BM_VEARM) developed at University of Minho - Portugal The theory is generated and represented by an attributed context-free formal grammar accepting some pre-requisites as input and producing as output canonical structures of virtual enterprises compliant to those pre-requisites. The formal theory of BM_VEARM virtual enterprises structures is in fact the formal language generated by the defined grammar.