The manufacturing practices have undergone a lot of changes in the past of few decades, from mass production through flexible and lean manufacturing towards agile manufacturing philosophy. And as a result, it lead to a concept called virtual enterprise (VE), which consists of a number of units geographically dispersed but managed as one total unit. Within virtual enterprise, there are many small firms making products and seeking alliances to serve customers' demands to their best ability. The construction of a virtual enterprise is based on several stages, i.e., task publishing, partner selection and determination, etc. In order to construct virtual enterprise quickly, it is necessary to have the task to be described correctly based on Web browsers. In this paper, we first investigate the requirements for collaborative manufacturing net in Pearl River Delta, and introduce the background and main functions of the constructed collaborative manufacturing net. As emphasis, an approach to describe the machining task based on this net, especially with feature mapping, is presented. After that, we discuss the reasons and feasibility of using feature mapping for partner selection and manufacturing chain construction. It is demonstrated, from our experiences in manufacturing industry and some enterprises, that the scheme for partner selection is effective and reliable.%分析了珠江三角洲企业对制造协作网的需求，介绍了建立制造协作网的背景。重点针对制造类任务，探讨了基于制造协作网的制造任务描述方法，特别提出了采用特征映射技术实现的制造任务描述方法。在此基础上，提出了合作伙伴的寻找策略及有关关键技术问题的解决方法。
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