The "extended enterprise" is a new emerging paradigm in the manufacturing arena. Indeed, global competition is pushing manufacturing enterprises in several industries either to split geographically the production capacity or to work together in supply chain organizations involving several independent entities. This dynamic is involving both big companies, whose organisation is always more and more decentralised and geographically distributed, and Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) that are embracing new organisation forms such as the Virtual Enterprise (VE) one. The "extended enterprise" allows gaining agility, reactive ness, even p- activeness, and, of course, efficiency in the highly dynamic markets of the mass customisation and knowledge based economy era. However, the "extended enterprise" paradigm scales management complexity both at the strategic and operational level up. This requires new tools for managing the complexity of the extended enterprise. The Information and Communication Technology (ICT) enables the possibility to create new and innovative "tools for managing the extended enterprise". This book addresses the above introduced issue of the tools for the extended enterprise. More specifically, it presents the results of a research developed under a two years program titled " "Distributed process and production planning in manufacturing enterprise networks" and funded by the Italian Ministry of Education, University and Research (MIUR) under the program PRIN2001.

The manufacturing industry is facing the challenges of shifting its operations from the traditional factory integration philosophy to a supply chain based e-factory philosophy, and of transforming the focus of companies from the local factory to global enterprise and business. Innovative Tools for Business Coalitions in B2B Applications presents a set of innovative methodologies that can be used to face all the issues that stem from the interaction of customers and suppliers in an e-marketplace environment. The first methodology discussed is multi-agent architecture and this forms the basis of a simulation environment developed in order to test the proposed models. The second concerns a bargaining model based on the negotiation mechanism and the third centers on production planning to support agents during the bargaining phase. The fourth is the possibility of a coalition between the suppliers and the authors offer a choice of two different approaches. One is the application of Nash equilibrium to select the members of a potential coalition of sellers, while the other is a centralized approach with a profit sharing mechanism based on the Shapley value. All the innovative approaches reported in Innovative Tools for Business Coalitions in B2B Applications have been statistically tested in different market conditions. The methodologies, approaches and results presented in Innovative Tools for Business Coalitions in B2B Applications will be of interest to PhD students, operations managers and supply chain management researchers who develop value-added services for an e-marketplace in a business-to-business environment.

The authors address production planning problems in distributed manufacturing networks from strategic, tactical organisational and operative perspectives. New methodologies for capacity negotiation, allocation and workload assignment in production networks are presented.

Production and Manufacturing System Management: Coordination Approaches and Multi-Site Planning presents relevant theoretical frameworks and most recent research findings in this area. This extensive collection of works provides significant theories for research students and scholars to carry out their continuous research as well as practitioners who aim to improve upon their understanding of distributed production planning.

The manufacturing industry is facing the challenges of shifting its operations from the traditional factory integration philosophy to a supply chain based e-factory philosophy, and of transforming the focus of companies from the local factory to global enterprise and business. Innovative Tools for Business Coalitions in B2B Applications presents a set of innovative methodologies that can be used to face all the issues that stem from the interaction of customers and suppliers in an e-marketplace environment. The first methodology discussed is multi-agent architecture and this forms the basis of a simulation environment developed in order to test the proposed models. The second concerns a bargaining model based on the negotiation mechanism and the third centers on production planning to support agents during the bargaining phase. The fourth is the possibility of a coalition between the suppliers and the authors offer a choice of two different approaches. One is the application of Nash equilibrium to select the members of a potential coalition of sellers, while the other is a centralized approach with a profit sharing mechanism based on the Shapley value. All the innovative approaches reported in Innovative Tools for Business Coalitions in B2B Applications have been statistically tested in different market conditions. The methodologies, approaches and results presented in Innovative Tools for Business Coalitions in B2B Applications will be of interest to PhD students, operations managers and supply chain management researchers who develop value-added services for an e-marketplace in a business-to-business environment.

The "extended enterprise" is a new emerging paradigm in the manufacturing arena. Indeed, global competition is pushing manufacturing enterprises in several industries either to split geographically the production capacity or to work together in supply chain organizations involving several independent entities. This dynamic is involving both big companies, whose organisation is always more and more decentralised and geographically distributed, and Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) that are embracing new organisation forms such as the Virtual Enterprise (VE) one. The "extended enterprise" allows gaining agility, reactive ness, even p- activeness, and, of course, efficiency in the highly dynamic markets of the mass customisation and knowledge based economy era. However, the "extended enterprise" paradigm scales management complexity both at the strategic and operational level up. This requires new tools for managing the complexity of the extended enterprise. The Information and Communication Technology (ICT) enables the possibility to create new and innovative "tools for managing the extended enterprise." This book addresses the above introduced issue of the tools for the extended enterprise. More specifically, it presents the results of a research developed under a two years program titled " "Distributed process and production planning in manufacturing enterprise networks" and funded by the Italian Ministry of Education, University and Research (MIUR) under the program PRIN2001.

No other book has been published giving a single-volume introduction and survey to production planning in distributed manufacturing networks. The published literature so far includes conference proceedings only.