Initiatives related to the proposed development of “services science” created a challenge for further development of the work system method, a systems analysis method designed for business professionals: Would it be possible to develop a version of the method that specifically addressed services? Although that research is on-going, thinking about services as a special type of work system led to...

One of the basic requirements of service providers is to deliver fast processing, highly available, scalable, redundant and unobtrusive AAA services. In this paper we present incorporation of Diameter service into a legacy switching system. Our approach is based on a component architecture and the use of open source software to speed-up the development cycle. The main idea is to multiply critic...

To allow connectivity between the general switched telephone network facsimile service (GSTN fax) and the e-mail-based Internet Fax service (i-fax), an "Internet Fax Gateway" is required. This document provides guidelines for the optional functionality of Internet Fax Gateways. In this context, an "offramp gateway" provides facsimile data transmission from i-fax to GSTN fax; vice versa, an "onr...

To allow connectivity between the general switched telephone network facsimile service (GSTN fax) and the e-mail-based Internet Fax service (i-fax), an "Internet Fax Gateway" is required. This document provides guidelines for the optional functionality of Internet Fax Gateways. In this context, an "offramp gateway" provides facsimile data transmission from i-fax to GSTN fax; vice versa, an "onr...

This paper empirically assesses the relative role of health plan prices, service quality and optional benefits in the decision to choose a health plan. We link representative German SOEP panel data from 2007 to 2010 to (i) health plan service quality indicators, (ii) measures of voluntary benefit provision on top of federally mandated benefits, and (iii) health plan prices for almost all German...

Multi-server retrial queue with second optional service: algorithmic computation and optimisation Jau-Chuan Ke a , Chia-Huang Wu b & Wen Lea Pearn b a Department of Applied Statistics , National Taichung Institute of Technology , No. 129, Sec. 3, Sanmin Road, Taichung, Taiwan 404, ROC b Department of Industrial Engineering and Management , National Chiao Tung University , Hsinchu, Taiwan 300, R...