Identifying partners and logical structures for VEs oriented to conceptual design

Recently much interest has been devoted to novel distributed approaches which lead to the formation of collaborative networked organizations, e.g. virtual organizations, specifically oriented to generate an innovative product concept. Making use of logical-formal structures based on concepts related to directed hypergraphs, we formally represent competitive inter-organization and collaborative intra-organization relationships. Thanks to these structures, models for distributed processes which lead to the emergence of both design chains and functional architectures of an innovative product are formally described and then illustrated through examples from an applicative scenario