During the construction of service-oriented architectures, service modelers concern themselves with the characteristics of good services and how such services can be designed. For instance, they look for advice regarding interface granularity and criteria to assess whether existing software assets are fit for reuse in service-oriented environments. There are no straightforward answers to such q...

Imagine that you are looking for an apartment to rent and are deciding between two options that entail an attribute trade-off. One apartment is spacious but far from your workplace; the other is closer but much less spacious. Construal level theory (Liberman and Trope 1998) suggests that when deciding between these two alternatives, consumers who engage in process-oriented thinking will prefer ...

We describe a decision-theoretic approach to providing user oriented and resource-adapted navigation instructions within buildings. Although information is broadcast by infrared senders in a unidirectional manner, we found it possible to treat the problem of assigning each sender both a user-oriented and resource-adapted broadcast program as a fully observable Markov decision problem.

In this paper, we give solvability conditions for three open problems of nonnegative inverse eigenvalues problem (NIEP) which were left hanging in the air up to seventy years. It will offer effective ways to judge an NIEP whether is solvable.

Available online 30 May 2012

This paper develops an approach based on performance targets to assess a preference function for a multiobjective decision under uncertainty. This approach yields preference functions that are strategically equivalent to conventional multiattribute utility functions, but the target-oriented approach is more natural for some classes of decisions. In some situations, the target-oriented preferenc...

Decision-making in the field of Enterprise Architecture (EA) is a complex task. Many organizations establish a set of complex processes and hierarchical structures to enable strategydriven development of their EA. This leads to slow and inefficient decision-making entailing bad time-to-market and discontented stakeholders. Collaborative EA delineates a lightweight approach to enable EA decision...

This paper examines the implications of utilizing decision support systems (DSS) in the public sector based on a DSS developed and implemented for a community mental health system. The DSS includes a multiple objective (goal programming) allocation model and encompasses a multiple party decision process. The experiences and insights acquired during the development and implementation are relevan...

Unavoidable disturbances induce the necessity of operations control and dispatching tasks in the timetable-driven rail traffic. Therefore, dispatching becomes one of the most relevant challenges for the economic success, since it directly affects the timeliness of passengers, which is a core indicator of customer satisfaction. Thus, the integration of passenger preferences into dispatching stra...

Object oriented analysis and design can be applied to the problem of organizational design and the Colored Petri Net formalism, while the supporting software can be used effectively to implement the approach. Furthermore, existing results can be mapped easily in this paradigm. A dynamical model representation of the organization is obtained that can be analyzed using both Petri Net theory and t...