Holon and holarchy are widely spread concepts in many domains and are used, among others, for building holonic virtual enterprises. However, the methods applied to create such holonic virtual enterprises are nowadays scarcely specified or they have limited applicability. In order to find detailed methods, the proposal is to give up the holonic paradigm and study the traditional partner selection proposals in virtual enterprises, trying their extrapolation to the holonic paradigm. These proposals are based on groups of key factors, but generally it is neither agreed on such factors nor on the way of performing the selection of member enterprises depending on these key factors. The suggestion on this matter is a well-defined game theory based method with a clear advantage: it is a procedural method which accepts any set of key factors; that is to say, it has a formal basis and it is not limited to a given set of key factors. Moreover, the proposed method is specifically oriented to the partners' selection in holonic virtual enterprises, providing a ranked list of the best potential holonic virtual enterprises instead of a unique holonic virtual enterprise. Finally, a case study is presented in order to illustrate the applicability of the proposal.

The concepts of holon and holarchy were first applied in the manufacturing world to develop Holonic Manufacturing Systems. Since then, they have been used in many fields and have proved to be applicable concepts for developing applications in any business area. Resulting applications are based on conceptual holonic constructions. Like any model, a holarchy needs to be validated under real circumstances. Such validation assures the quality of the holarchy before it is implemented. In general, validation research tends to target: 1) the specific types of holons handled in each proposal and/or the selected development paradigms; and 2) algorithm performance rather than architecture quality. This paper proposes and evaluates a methodology that focuses on the quality of the architecture. This methodology is able to validate any holonic architecture built to meet trade requirements. Moreover, this is a general-purpose methodology. Therefore, the methodology would be valid for any domain and would not be invalidated by holon types and/or implementation paradigms emerging, changing or falling into disuse. For this purpose, we consider holonic architectures as conceptual models, using the pure holon and holarchy concepts and passing up not only any specific implementation paradigm but also any set of specific holon types.

Project planning and control is currently of crucial importance for software engineering. Failed projects waste billions of dollars and hours so the early identification of a troubled project will avoid substantial economic losses. Thus, the ideal situation would be to have a team of experts to analyse the project indicators, detect troubled projects and develop recovery plans. It’s hard to deal with this task in the real-life working because of the economic and temporary cost to businesses. This paper proposes a knowledge-based system to reduce these costs. The knowledge-based system evaluates the level of problems of the projects every x time, so full-time experts in project control are not needed. Just when a project could be in trouble the stakeholders will decide if a team of experts is required to evaluate the project and to take the necessary actions.

To solve any nontrivial problem, it first needs to be conceptualized, taking into account the individual who has the problem. However, a problem is generally associated with more than one individual, as is usually the case in software development. Therefore, this process has to take into account different viewpoints about the problem and any discrepancies that could arise as a result. Traditionally, conceptualization in software engineering has omitted the different viewpoints that the individuals may have of the problem and has inherently enforced consistency in the event of any discrepancies, which are considered as something to be systematically rejected. The paper presents a methodological framework that explicitly drives the conceptualization of different viewpoints and manages the different types of discrepancies that arise between them, which become really important in the process. The definition of this framework is generic, and it is therefore independent of any particular software development paradigm. Its application to software engineering means that viewpoints and their possible discrepancies can be considered in the software process conceptual modeling phase. This application is illustrated by means of what is considered to be a standard problem: the IFIP case.