# Collaborative Networks: A Pillar of Digital Transformation
## 5 Relevant Collaboration Aspects in Industry 4.0
### Collaboration in Horizontal Integration  
Increasing levels of integration and collaboration among business partners, customers, and other stakeholders (e.g., regulators, support institutions) along the value chain is a classical subject (Figure 6). Starting with the old notion of \"supply chain\", progressing with the challenges of \"dynamic supply chains\", and early focus on CNs such as \"extended enterprise\" and \"virtual enterprise\", this dimension was in fact the trigger for the emergence of the area of CNs.  
The need to share and combine information, knowledge, and other resources along the value chain, as well as developing agile coordination mechanisms to support inter-organizational processes, correspond to important facets of collaboration.  
The emergence of strategic long-term alliances, such as industry clusters, business ecosystems and global value chains, requires new organizational structures and advanced models of collaboration in which global optimization, rather than enterprise-centric objectives, is pursued [35].  
Flexibility and agility, as well as resilience in the face of shocks and disruptions, require the capability to rapidly form goal-oriented networks (virtual organizations) in response to turbulent and even disruptive market conditions [68].  
An important sub-area that becomes more relevant when value chains become global, is transportation logistics, which typically require close cooperation of multiple operators.  
Effective tracing and tracking functionalities along the value chains and products' history, which are more and more demanded for accountability and transparency, require high levels of collaboration and sharing among stakeholders.  
Similarly, concerns about sustainability led to the need to consider the full lifecycle of products, including disposal and recycling, and the emergence of the circular economy [69], which again imply collaboration among all entities involved in the product lifecycle.  
As a more recent trend, new models of \"extreme distributed manufacturing\" such as those induced by movable factories, micro-factories and 3D printing, clearly point to multi-stakeholder networks, with customers' involvement. Some recent visionary works address the combination of sustainable manufacturing and smart cities [70], which brings collaboration needs to a wider scale.  
What Can CNs Contribute?  
As mentioned above, this dimension has been extensively covered by CN research during the last decades [32; 33]. Some examples of relevant results include:  
A variety of organizational forms, including \"strategic alliances\" (namely VBEs, such as \"industry clusters\", \"business ecosystems\", etc.) and \"goal-oriented networks\" (e.g., \"virtual enterprises\"/\"virtual organizations\") [35], and also the concept of the green VBE [71].  
Figure 6: Collaboration in horizontal integration.  
Collaboration platforms, collaboration-support tools, and distributed information/knowledge management systems, covering the various stages of the CN's lifecycle [35; 72; 73]. Various ontologies have also been developed in support of collaboration [74].
* Collaboration-oriented governance and behavioral models for the various classes of CBNs [75; 76; 77].
* Inter-organizational workflows, distributed business processes, and business services management [78; 79; 80].
* Trust management, including models and support tools [40; 45].
* Reference models for CNs, such as ARCON [39; 81; 82].
* Collaborative logistics networks [83; 84].
* Approaches to resilience in a CN context [68; 85].