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This paper presents the approach and some results of the COCONET Roadmap project (1ST-2001–37460). This project has as its objective to prepare a strategy and roadmap for RTD of high industrial impact in the area of context-aware collaborative environments for next generation business networks. The roadmap approach as presented here is based on scenarios for future work and business environments. Major challenges in future RTD are described and the approach is evaluated.

The main scope of this paper is to present a set of enabling services that support the establishment and management of Virtual Enterprises and the integration and interoperation of business processes. Based on a virtual enterprise life-cycle model that we propose, different business domains can integrate their business processes in order to provide transparently services to the end-users and customers of the Virtual Enterprise (VE). The appropriate enabling services are identified, analyzed and certain details regarding their design is given. These enabling services are the VE contract manager, the BP administrator, and the BP controller. Underlying services needed for the integration and execution of shared business processes are also proposed. Our proposed enabling services reduce the cost of development, maintenance and integration of shared business processes in VEs by applying interoperable, distributed object oriented technologies.