Decision model to support the SMEs’ decision to participate or leave a collaborative network

Enterprises need to adopt new business paradigms in order to make a rapid response to market changes and improve the competitiveness. The development of information and communication technology allows the support of new business paradigms such as extended enterprises, virtual organisations, regional clusters, etc. The research proposed concerns the study of a dynamic network in which the partners change in short term periods. The model proposed supports the enterprises in the decisions to participate or exit in a network of enterprises. The model is based on the definition of a set of rules that operate with local information to take the decisions. The local information is the output of the collaboration process; this means that the approach proposed integrates the collaboration methodology and the decision model. This environment is related to independent plants that cooperate with reduced information sharing. A simulation environment is developed to test the approach proposed. The simulation results show that the proposed approach is a very promising tool to support the enterprise's participation decisions.