International Handbooks on Information Systems – serie

Due to the increasing importance of product differentiation and collapsing product life cycles, a growing number of value-adding activities in the industry and service sector are organized in projects. Projects come in many forms, often taking considerable time and consuming a large amount of resources. The management and scheduling of projects represents a challenging task, and project performance may have a considerable impact on an organization's competitiveness.This handbook presents state-of-the-art approaches to project management and scheduling. More than sixty contributions written by leading experts in the field provide an authoritative survey of recent developments. The book serves as a comprehensive reference, both, for researchers and project management professionals.The handbook consists of two volumes. Volume 1 is devoted to single-modal and multi-modal project scheduling. Volume 2 presents multi-project problems, project scheduling under uncertainty and vagueness, managerial approaches and a separate part on applications, case studies and information systems.

Due to the increasing importance of product differentiation and collapsing product life cycles, a growing number of value-adding activities in the industry and service sector are organized in projects. Projects come in many forms, often taking considerable time and consuming a large amount of resources. The management and scheduling of projects represents a challenging task and project performance may have a considerable impact on an organization's competitiveness.This handbook presents state-of-the-art approaches to project management and scheduling. More than sixty contributions written by leading experts in the field provide an authoritative survey of recent developments. The book serves as a comprehensive reference, both, for researchers and project management professionals.The handbook consists of two volumes. Volume 1 is devoted to single-modal and multi-modal project scheduling. Volume 2 presents multi-project problems, project scheduling under uncertainty and vagueness, managerial approaches and a separate part on applications, case studies and information systems.

Due to the increasing importance of product differentiation and collapsing product life cycles, a growing number of value-adding activities in the industry and service sector are organized in projects. Projects come in many forms, often taking considerable time and consuming a large amount of resources. The management and scheduling of projects represents a challenging task, and project performance may have a considerable impact on an organization's competitiveness.This handbook presents state-of-the-art approaches to project management and scheduling. More than sixty contributions written by leading experts in the field provide an authoritative survey of recent developments. The book serves as a comprehensive reference, both, for researchers and project management professionals.The handbook consists of two volumes. Volume 1 is devoted to single-modal and multi-modal project scheduling. Volume 2 presents multi-project problems, project scheduling under uncertainty and vagueness, managerial approaches and a separate part on applications, case studies and information systems.

Due to the increasing importance of product differentiation and collapsing product life cycles, a growing number of value-adding activities in the industry and service sector are organized in projects. Projects come in many forms, often taking considerable time and consuming a large amount of resources. The management and scheduling of projects represents a challenging task and project performance may have a considerable impact on an organization's competitiveness.This handbook presents state-of-the-art approaches to project management and scheduling. More than sixty contributions written by leading experts in the field provide an authoritative survey of recent developments. The book serves as a comprehensive reference, both, for researchers and project management professionals.The handbook consists of two volumes. Volume 1 is devoted to single-modal and multi-modal project scheduling. Volume 2 presents multi-project problems, project scheduling under uncertainty and vagueness, managerial approaches and a separate part on applications, case studies and information systems.

This handbook provides a comprehensive introduction to the theory and applications of scheduling in advanced planning and computer systems. It addresses a broad audience including practitioners and researchers interested in scheduling, as well as graduate and advanced undergraduate students in the fields of computer science and computer engineering, operations research, industrial and real-time engineering, management science, business administration and information systems, and applied mathematics.The book begins by providing an introduction to and basic concepts from discrete mathematics. Single and multiple processor systems are covered, with a focus on multiprocessor tasks and hard real-time systems. Flow shop and open shop scheduling, as well as scheduling in job shops, are explained in detail. Issues like limited processor availability, time-dependence, resource constraints and imprecise computations are dealt with in dedicated chapters. Special attention is given toonline scheduling, constraint programming and disjunctive scheduling. The book also features applications and cases involving flexible manufacturing systems, computer integrated production scheduling and logistics. In particular it presents case studies on optimization procedures for the production of acrylic glass and of helicopter parts in a flexible manufacturing system, an efficient decision support system for airport gate scheduling, concrete delivery planning, and berth and quay crane allocation at seaports.

This Handbook is about methods, tools and examples of how to architect an enterprise through considering all life cycle aspects of Enterprise Entities (such as individual enterprises, enterprise networks, virtual enterprises, projects and other complex systems including a mixture of automated and human processes). The book is based on ISO15704:2000, or the GERAM Framework (Generalised Enterprise Reference Architecture and Methodology) that generalises the requirements of Enterprise Reference Architectures. Various Architecture Frameworks (PERA, CIMOSA, Grai-GIM, Zachman, C4ISR/DoDAF) are shown in light of GERAM to allow a deeper understanding of their contributions and therefore their correct and knowledgeable use. The handbook addresses a wide variety of audience, and covers methods and tools necessary to design or redesign enterprises, as well as to structure the implementation into manageable projects.

As the most comprehensive reference work dealing with knowledge management (KM), this work is essential for the library of every KM practitioner, researcher, and educator. Written by an international array of KM luminaries, its approx. 60 chapters approach knowledge management from a wide variety of perspectives ranging from classic foundations to cutting-edge thought, informative to provocative, theoretical to practical, historical to futuristic, human to technological, and operational to strategic. The chapters are conveniently organized into 8 major sections. The first volume consists of the sections: foundations of KM, knowledge - a key organizational resource, knowledge processors and processing, influences on knowledge processing. Novices and experts alike will refer to the authoritative and stimulating content again and again for years to come.

As the most comprehensive reference work dealing with knowledge management (KM), this work is essential for the library of every KM practitioner, researcher, and educator. Written by an international array of KM luminaries, its approx. 60 chapters approach knowledge management from a wide variety of perspectives ranging from classic foundations to cutting-edge thought, informative to provocative, theoretical to practical, historical to futuristic, human to technological, and operational to strategic. The chapters are conveniently organized into 8 major sections. The second volume consists of the sections: technologies for knowledge management, outcomes of KM, knowledge management in action, and the KM horizon. Novices and experts alike will refer to the authoritative and stimulating content again and again for years to come.

Advances in automation for electronic commerce require improved understanding and formalization of the objects, processes, and policies of commerce itself. These include business objects such as bills of lading and contracts; processes such as workflows and trade procedures; and policies covering such problems as contract or procedure validation and strategic behaviour. This book is about theory, formalization, and proof-of-concept implementation of these and related matters. In addition to presenting state-of-the-art results, the book places this work in the context of nearly twenty years of developments in formal modelling for electronic commerce. A comprehensive bibliography and index are provided.

This book is the first volume of a running series under the title Inter- tional Handbooks on Information Systems. The series is edited by Peter Bernus, Jacek Blazewicz, Günter Schmidt and Mike Shaw. One objective is to give state of the art surveys on selected topics of information systems theory and applications. To this end, a distinguished international group of academics and practitioners are invited to provide a reference source not only for problem solvers in business, industry, and government but also for professional researchers and graduate students. It seemed appropriate to start the series with a volume covering some basic aspects about information systems. The focus of the first volume is therefore architectures. It was decided to have a balanced number of c- tributions from academia and practitioners. The structure of the material follows a differentiation betweeen modelling languages, tools and meth- ologies. These are collected into separate parts, allowing the reader of the handbook a better comparison of the contributions. Information systems are a major component of the entire enterprise and the reader will notice that many contributions could just as easily have been included in another volume of the series which is on enterprise in- gration. Conversely, some traditionally information systems topics, as - ganisational analysis and strategic change management methods, will be treated in more depth in the Handbook on Enterprise Integration. The two volumes will complement each other.

1 Multiagent Engineering: A New Software Construction Paradigm Multiagent systems have a long academic tradition. They have their roots in distributed problem solving in Artificial Intelligence (AI) from where they emerged in the mid-eighties as a distinctive discipline. Research in multiagent systems owes much to the work of Rosenschein on rationality and autonomy of intelligent agents, the European MAAMAW workshop series, and last but not least the famous readings of Bond & Gasser (1988) and Jacques Ferber´s book on multiagent systems (1991). It gained further by a public discussion via the Distributed AI mailing list in summer 1991, when the pioneers of the field compared in much detail the concepts of distributed problem solvers to multiagent systems. Within only five years, a new exciting field of research had been established. Now, 15 years later, the field has matured to a degree that allows the - sults of academic research to be passed on to practical use and commercial exploitation. This potential coincides with a need for much larger flexib- ity of our IT infrastructure in light of its highly distributed character and extreme complexity, but also the global character of the business processes and the large number of business partners due to outsourcing and specia- zation. Many experts claim that multiagent systems are the right software technology for the needed IT infrastructure at the right time. The appeal has much to do with the broad perspectives of multiagent systems research.

As the most comprehensive reference work dealing with knowledge management (KM), this work is essential for the library of every KM practitioner, researcher, and educator. Written by an international array of KM luminaries, its approx. 60 chapters approach knowledge management from a wide variety of perspectives ranging from classic foundations to cutting-edge thought, informative to provocative, theoretical to practical, historical to futuristic, human to technological, and operational to strategic. The chapters are conveniently organized into 8 major sections. The first volume consists of the sections: foundations of KM, knowledge - a key organizational resource, knowledge processors and processing, influences on knowledge processing. Novices and experts alike will refer to the authoritative and stimulating content again and again for years to come.

As the most comprehensive reference work dealing with knowledge management (KM), this work is essential for the library of every KM practitioner, researcher, and educator. Written by an international array of KM luminaries, its approx. 60 chapters approach knowledge management from a wide variety of perspectives ranging from classic foundations to cutting-edge thought, informative to provocative, theoretical to practical, historical to futuristic, human to technological, and operational to strategic. The chapters are conveniently organized into 8 major sections. The second volume consists of the sections: technologies for knowledge management, outcomes of KM, knowledge management in action, and the KM horizon. Novices and experts alike will refer to the authoritative and stimulating content again and again for years to come.

This book is the sixth of a running series of volumes dedicated to selected topics of information theory and practice. The objective of the series is to pro­ vide a reference source for problem solvers in business, industry, government, and professional researchers and gradute students. The first volume, Handbook on Architecture of Information Systems, presents a balanced number of contributions from academia and practition­ ers. The structure of the material follows a differentiation between model­ ing languages, tools and methodologies. The second volume, Handbook on Electronic Commerce, examines electronic commerce storefront, on-line busi­ ness, consumer interface, business-to-business networking, digital payment, legal issues, information product development and electronic business mod­ els. The third volume, Handbook on Parallel and Distributed Processing, presents basic concepts, methods, and recent developments in the field of parallel and distributed processing as well as some important aplications of parallel and distributed computing. In particular, the book examines such fundamental issues in the above area as languages for parallel processing, parallel operating systems, architecture of parallel and distributed systems, parallel database and multimedia systems, networking aspects of parallel and distributed systems, efficiency of parallel algorithms. The fourth volume on Information Technologies for Education and Training is· devoted to a pre­ sentation of current and future research and applications in the field of ed­ ucational technology. The fifth double volume on Knowledge Management contains an extensive, fundamental coverage of the knowledge management field.

Decision support systems have experienced a marked increase in attention and importance over the past 25 years. The aim of this book is to survey the decision support system (DSS) field – covering both developed territory and emergent frontiers. It will give the reader a clear understanding of fundamental DSS concepts, methods, technologies, trends, and issues. It will serve as a basic reference work for DSS research, practice, and instruction. To achieve these goals, the book has been designed according to a ten-part structure, divided in two volumes with chapters authored by well-known, well-versed scholars and practitioners from the DSS community.

As the most comprehensive reference work dealing with decision support systems (DSS), this book is essential for the library of every DSS practitioner, researcher, and educator. Written by an international array of DSS luminaries, its more than 70 chapters approach decision support systems from a wide variety of perspectives ranging from classic foundations to cutting-edge thought, informative to provocative, theoretical to practical, historical to futuristic, human to technological, and operational to strategic. The chapters are conveniently organized into 10 major sections: foundations of decision support systems, DSS fundamentals, multiparticipant DSSs, intelligent DSSs, effects of decision support, time and space issues, scopes of decision support, developing and managing decision support systems, cases and applications, and decision support horizons. Novices and experts alike will refer to the authoritative and stimulating content again and again for years to come.

Why do we need a handbook on Information Technology (IT) and Finance? At first, because both IT as well as finance, are some of the most prominent driving forces of our contemporary world. Secondly, because both areas develop with a terrific speed causing an urgent need of up to date information on recent dev- opments. Thirdly, because serious applications of IT in Finance require specialists with a professional training and professional knowledge in both areas. Over the last decades the world has seen many changes in politics, economics, science and legislation. The driving forces behind many of these developments are of a technological nature. One of the key technologies with this respect is Infor- tion Technology. IT is the most prominent technology revolutionizing the ind- trial development, from products and processes to services, as well as finance, which is itself one of the central pillars of modern economics. The explosive - velopment of the Internet emphasizes the importance of IT, since it is today’s key factor driving global access and availability of information and allows the division of labour on an international scale, the globalization. The profound transformation of finance and the financial industry over the last twenty years was driven by technological developments – e. g.

The world is undergoing a revolution to a digital economy, with pronounced implications for corporate strategy, marketing, operations, information systems, customer services, global supply chain management, and product distribution. This handbook examines aspects of electronic commerce, including electronic storefront, on-line business, consumer interface, business-to-business networking, digital payment, legal issues, information product development, and electronic business models.

In this volume authors of academia and practice provide practitioners, scientists and graduate students with a good overview of basic methods and paradigms, as well as important issues and trends across the broad spectrum of parallel and distributed processing. In particular, the book covers fundamental topics such as efficient parallel algorithms, languages for parallel processing, parallel operating systems, architecture of parallel and distributed systems, management of resources, tools for parallel computing, parallel database systems and multimedia object servers, and networking aspects of distributed and parallel computing. Three chapters are dedicated to applications: parallel and distributed scientific computing, high-performance computing in molecular sciences, and multimedia applications for parallel and distributed systems. Summing up, the Handbook is indispensable for academics and professionals who are interested in learning the leading expert`s view of the topic.

The U.S. and other developed nations are undergoing a transition from a paper econ­ omy to a digital economy, not unlike the transition from an oral exchange economy to a physically recorded (clay, papyrus) exchange economy that took place several millennia ago. As with the earlier transition, a change in the medium for recording and reporting transactions (i.e., from oral to written, from written to electronic) is bringing about a significant change in the economic and social system in which they are imbedded. The oral-to-written transition eventually gave us the concepts of property rights, commercial law, accounting standards, and financial transparency. What will the written-to-electronic transition give us? The answer is not clear, but we can expect that the economic system that follows this transition will differ substantially from the current system to which we are accustomed. In this book we examine the electronic exchange mechanisms of the emerging digital economy. We do so by examining eight salient topics in electronic commerce (EC). Each of these topics is examined in detail in a separate section of this book.

An ontology is a formal description of concepts and relationships that can exist for a community of human and/or machine agents. The notion of ontologies is crucial for the purpose of enabling knowledge sharing and reuse. The Handbook on Ontologies provides a comprehensive overview of the current status and future prospectives of the field of ontologies considering ontology languages, ontology engineering methods, example ontologies, infrastructures and technologies for ontologies, and how to bring this all into ontology-based infrastructures and applications that are among the best of their kind. The field of ontologies has tremendously developed and grown in the five years since the first edition of the "Handbook on Ontologies". Therefore, its revision includes 21 completely new chapters as well as a major re-working of 15 chapters transferred to this second edition.

Education and training have faced many challenges in the past five years – political, educational, and technological trends such as the European Bologna process, Lifelong Learning and the use of Social Software are just a few of the factors influencing this field. Furthermore, technology-enhanced lea- ing has become the mainstream of educational and training innovation. Within this context, this second edition of the Handbook on “Infor- tion Technologies for Learning, Education, and Training” attempts to capture the state-of-the-art in technology-enhanced learning, as it has emerged during the last years and anticipates important future developments. As the Handbook Editors, we have aimed to provide a comprehensive guide for both researchers and practitioners working in the field of Technology-enhanced Learning and Training. Our overall objective is to enable the reader to gain a deep understanding of the past, present, and future research and applications in this field. From a research perspective, the readers will obtain an in-depth und- standing of the complex theories, strategies, concepts, and methods of Technology-enhanced Learning. Based on these fundamentals they will be able to develop new and innovative approaches for the next generation of Technology-enhanced Learning.

Quick Response (QR) policy is a market-driven business strategy in which supply chain members work together to react quickly to volatile market demand. Nowadays, with advances in information technologies (such as RFID and ERP systems), new challenges and opportunities arise for the application of QR. This handbook explores QR extensively with a view to discovering innovative QR measures that can help tackle the observed and emerging challenges. The book is organized into four parts, which include chapters on analytical modeling and analyses, information technologies, cases, reviews, and applications. This handbook provides new analytical and empirical results with valuable insights, which will not only help supply chain agents to better understand the latest applications of QR in business, but also help practitioners and researchers to know how to improve the effectiveness of QR using innovative methods.

This Handbook is about methods, tools and examples of how to architect an enterprise through considering all life cycle aspects of Enterprise Entities (such as individual enterprises, enterprise networks, virtual enterprises, projects and other complex systems including a mixture of automated and human processes). The book is based on ISO15704:2000, or the GERAM Framework (Generalised Enterprise Reference Architecture and Methodology) that generalises the requirements of Enterprise Reference Architectures. Various Architecture Frameworks (PERA, CIMOSA, Grai-GIM, Zachman, C4ISR/DoDAF) are shown in light of GERAM to allow a deeper understanding of their contributions and therefore their correct and knowledgeable use. The handbook addresses a wide variety of audience, and covers methods and tools necessary to design or redesign enterprises, as well as to structure the implementation into manageable projects.

1 Multiagent Engineering: A New Software Construction Paradigm Multiagent systems have a long academic tradition. They have their roots in distributed problem solving in Artificial Intelligence (AI) from where they emerged in the mid-eighties as a distinctive discipline. Research in multiagent systems owes much to the work of Rosenschein on rationality and autonomy of intelligent agents, the European MAAMAW workshop series, and last but not least the famous readings of Bond & Gasser (1988) and Jacques Ferber´s book on multiagent systems (1991). It gained further by a public discussion via the Distributed AI mailing list in summer 1991, when the pioneers of the field compared in much detail the concepts of distributed problem solvers to multiagent systems. Within only five years, a new exciting field of research had been established. Now, 15 years later, the field has matured to a degree that allows the - sults of academic research to be passed on to practical use and commercial exploitation. This potential coincides with a need for much larger flexib- ity of our IT infrastructure in light of its highly distributed character and extreme complexity, but also the global character of the business processes and the large number of business partners due to outsourcing and specia- zation. Many experts claim that multiagent systems are the right software technology for the needed IT infrastructure at the right time. The appeal has much to do with the broad perspectives of multiagent systems research.

In this volume authors of academia and practice provide practitioners, scientists and graduate students with a good overview of basic methods and paradigms, as well as important issues and trends across the broad spectrum of parallel and distributed processing. In particular, the book covers fundamental topics such as efficient parallel algorithms, languages for parallel processing, parallel operating systems, architecture of parallel and distributed systems, management of resources, tools for parallel computing, parallel database systems and multimedia object servers, and networking aspects of distributed and parallel computing. Three chapters are dedicated to applications: parallel and distributed scientific computing, high-performance computing in molecular sciences, and multimedia applications for parallel and distributed systems. Summing up, the Handbook is indispensable for academics and professionals who are interested in learning the leading expert`s view of the topic.

Education and training have faced many challenges in the past five years – political, educational, and technological trends such as the European Bologna process, Lifelong Learning and the use of Social Software are just a few of the factors influencing this field. Furthermore, technology-enhanced lea- ing has become the mainstream of educational and training innovation. Within this context, this second edition of the Handbook on “Infor- tion Technologies for Learning, Education, and Training” attempts to capture the state-of-the-art in technology-enhanced learning, as it has emerged during the last years and anticipates important future developments. As the Handbook Editors, we have aimed to provide a comprehensive guide for both researchers and practitioners working in the field of Technology-enhanced Learning and Training. Our overall objective is to enable the reader to gain a deep understanding of the past, present, and future research and applications in this field. From a research perspective, the readers will obtain an in-depth und- standing of the complex theories, strategies, concepts, and methods of Technology-enhanced Learning. Based on these fundamentals they will be able to develop new and innovative approaches for the next generation of Technology-enhanced Learning.

Channel coordination is a core subject of supply chain management. Over the past decade, much research effort has been devoted to exploring the detailed mechanisms for achieving supply chain coordination under uncertainty, generating many fruitful analytical and empirical results. Despite the abundance of research results, there is an absence of a comprehensive reference source that provides state-of-the-art findings on both theoretical and applied research on the subject. In addition, with the advance of knowledge and technologies, many new topics on supply chain coordination under uncertainty have appeared in recent years. This handbook extensively examines supply chain coordination challenges with a focal point on discovering innovative measures that can help tackle the existing and emerging challenges. The book is organized into five parts, which include chapters on innovative analytical models for coordination, channel power and bargaining, technological advancements and applications, empirical analysis, cases studies and review. This handbook provides new empirical and analytical results with precious insights, which will not only help supply chain agents to understand more about the latest measures for supply chain coordination under uncertainty, but also help practitioners and researchers to know how to improve supply chain performance based on innovative methods.

Quick Response (QR) policy is a market-driven business strategy in which supply chain members work together to react quickly to volatile market demand. Nowadays, with advances in information technologies (such as RFID and ERP systems), new challenges and opportunities arise for the application of QR. This handbook explores QR extensively with a view to discovering innovative QR measures that can help tackle the observed and emerging challenges. The book is organized into four parts, which include chapters on analytical modeling and analyses, information technologies, cases, reviews, and applications. This handbook provides new analytical and empirical results with valuable insights, which will not only help supply chain agents to better understand the latest applications of QR in business, but also help practitioners and researchers to know how to improve the effectiveness of QR using innovative methods.