PRO-VE 2020

Boosting collaborative networks 4.0

Collaborative networks play a key role in the ongoing process of digital transformation in industry and services. Although the collaborative networks (CN) area is relatively young, a number of major milestones can be identified in its “revolution” over the last decades:

• Collaborative Networks 1.0: focused on goal-oriented networks (e.g. supply chains, extended enterprises, virtual enterprises and virtual organisations).
• Collaborative Networks 2.0: focused on CN breeding environments (e.g. business ecosystems, industry clusters, industrial districts and professional virtual communities).
• Collaborative Networks 3.0: focused on the interplay among multiple CNs (e.g. hybrid value system networks and co-creation networks).

Research and development is now beginning to address Collaborative Networks 4.0, whose main distinctive features include hybridisation (networks consisting of organisations, people, machines and intelligent systems), collaboration between humans and intelligent autonomous systems, distributed cognitive systems, accountability, ethics and coping with risks and disruptions, handling large amounts of data, monetisation of collaboration, creation of a collaboration culture, collaboration creativity, mass collaboration, and new business models focusing on collaborative value creation, among others.

PRO-VE 2020 was conceived as a forum for sharing experiences, discussing trends and identifying opportunities around these challenges, with contributions from computer science, manufacturing, industrial, electrical and computing engineering, social sciences and organisation science, among others.

Topics

• Collaborative models, platforms and systems for digital transformation
• Business ecosystems and collaboration in Industry 4.0
• Hybridisation of collaboration: organisations, people, machines and systems
• Big data analytics and intelligence
• Collaborative cyber-physical systems
• Distributed cognitive systems
• Risk, performance and disruptions in collaborative networked systems
• Semantic data and service discovery, retrieval and composition in a collaborative networked world
• Ethics, trust, culture of collaboration and sustainability in CNs
• Value creation, collaboration monetisation and social impact of collaborative networks
• Intelligent platforms supporting collaborative systems
• Collective intelligence and collaboration in advanced and emerging applications: collaborative manufacturing and factories of the future, e-health and care, food and agribusiness, and crisis and disaster management

The conference was finally held virtually on 23–25 November 2020, and its proceedings were published by Springer in the IFIP AICT series (volume 598).