Value-Oriented Design of Service Coordination Processes: Correctness and Trust

The rapid growth of service coordination languages creates a need for methodological support for coordination design. Coordination design differs from workflow design because a coordination process connects different businesses that can each make design decisions independently from the others, and no business is interested in supporting the business processes of others. In multi-business cooperative design, design decisions are only supported by all businesses if they contribute to the profitability of each participating business. So in order to make coordination design decisions supported by all participating businesses, requirements for a coordination process should be derived from the business model that makes the coordination profitable for each participating business. We claim that this business model is essentially a model of intended value exchanges. We model the intended value exchanges of a business model as e3 -value value models and coordination processes as UML activity diagrams. The contribution of the paper is then to propose and discuss a criterion according to which a service coordination process must be correct with respect to a value exchange model. This correctness is necessary to gain business support for the process. Finally, we discuss methodological consequences of this approach for service coordination process design

Valuing the Attributes of Freight Transport Quality: Results of the Stated Preference Survey

This paper presents the results of a survey of fifty firms transporting ten commodity groups, using an interactive stated preference game to obtain values of the rate reduction necessary to compensate for longer transit times, poorer reliability and the use of intermodal systems. Generally, the pattern of results is as expected, with the quality of the transport service being less important for low value products in industries with high levels of stockholding, and vice versa. Quality requirements are also generally less stringent when products are moving to depots than to customers. In a critique of the method, some reservations are expressed both about the reliability of the results, andabout the high cost and time of the survey method. Nevertheless, we conclude that overall the approach has worked reasonably well, and yielded much valuable data; we know of no alternative method which could have yielded quantitative valuations in these circumstances

Import procedures for timber to the European Union : options for streamlining procedures for legal timber

This report provides a description of the institutions involved in timber import and an overview of import procedures and related documents in the Netherlands in the framework of the European Union Action Plan for Forest Law Enforcement, Governance and Trade (FLEGT). FLEGT aims at establishing Voluntary Partnership Agreements (VPAs) between the EU and timber producing countries. The report includes recommendations with respect to streamlining import procedures and electronic document handling