Planning and Management of Large, Distributed Systems and Projects

Enterprises which are distributed in space and/or which are composed as a temporary joint venture of legally different units recently often called virtual (extended) enterprises. Planning, design and operation (management) goals and requirements of such firms are generally different from those of single, centralised enterprises. The basic feature of a virtua) enterprise is that the co-operating units of it keep their independence during the life-cycle of the co-operation – what is well regulated by the rules of the given conglomerate. On the other hand that several basic functionalities and goals are the same for all types of distributed, large, complex organisations, which are the targets of our recent study. The evolution of some web-based manufacturing design/planning and operation system philosophies can be followed through the works presented in this paper. We intend to give software solutions for design, planning and operation (management) of complex, networked organisations represented as nodes of networks.