Preface

Virtual Organisations (VOs) are groups of individuals, organisations and machines that collaborate to achieve a common goal, for example to take advantage of a short-term market opportunity or respond to an acute crisis. The formation and operation of VOs are enabled by modern network-based architectures and the complexity of VOs and the reliance placed on them is increasing. Models, methods and tools that promote the verifiable design and reliable operation of VOs are urgently needed, but these are these tools are far from fully mature.

The presentations at FAVO 2011 were diverse. The first two touched on issues of access control. Hilbert et al. explored challenges related to the exchange of complex and confidential models in the construction industry. Bab et al. used Abstract State Machines to explore a general model of Virtual Organisations (or, in their work, Dynamic Coalitions) which was augmented with access control primitives. In the third paper, Reiff-Marganiec explores how a workflow language could be extended to the more challenging domain of Virtual Organisations.

Each paper received reviews by three members of the Programme Committee, which included:

• Hamideh Afsarmanesh, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands
• Alvaro Arenas, CCLRC Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, UK
• Jeremy Bryans, Newcastle University, UK
• Luis Camarinha-Matos, Universidada Nova de Lisboa, Portugal
• Wojciech Cellary, Poznan University of Economics, Poland
• John Fitzgerald, Newcastle University, UK
• Tomasz Janowski, UNU-IIST Center for Electronic Governance, Macau SAR, China
• Giovanna di Marzo Serugendo, Birkbeck College, London, UK
• Philippe Massonet, CETIC, Belgium
• Tom McCutcheon, Dstl, UK

We are grateful to the organisers of the PRO-VE 2011 conference for all their help in the organisation.