Modeling rolling stock maintenance logistics at Dutch Railways with declarative business artifacts

A case study is presented in which the maintenance logistics process of rolling stock (train units) at Dutch Railways is modeled. This decision-intensive process has a high complexity due to its many steps and the different actors that are involved. Declarative Business Artifacts are used as modeling technique to master this complexity. We discuss the key elements of the artifact model and focus on encountered issues and lessons learned. The artifact model is compared with an earlier developed agent-based model of the maintenance logistics process. The case study shows that declarative business artifacts are a promising technique to structure complex decision-intensive processes

Modeling rolling stock maintenance logistics at Dutch Railways with declarative business artifacts

A case study is presented in which the maintenance logistics process of rolling stock (train units) at Dutch Railways is modeled. This decision-intensive process has a high complexity due to its many steps and the different actors that are involved. Declarative Business Artifacts are used as modeling technique to master this complexity. We discuss the key elements of the artifact model and focus on encountered issues and lessons learned. The artifact model is compared with an earlier developed agent-based model of the maintenance logistics process. The case study shows that declarative business artifacts are a promising technique to structure complex decision-intensive processes

Machine Learning Algorithms for Smart Electricity Markets

__Abstract__ The shift towards sustainable electricity systems is one of the grand challenges of the twenty-first century. Decentralized production from renewable sources, electric mobility, and related advances are at odds with traditional power systems where central large-scale generation of electricity follows inelastic consumer demand. Smart Markets and intelligent Information Systems (IS) could alleviate these issues by providing new forms of coordination that leverage real-time consumption information and prices to incentivize behaviors that remain within the grid's operational bounds. However, the best design for these artifacts, and the societal implications of different design choices is largely unclear. This dissertation makes three contributions to the debate. First, we propose and study a design for Brokers, a novel type of IS for autonomous intermediation in retail electricity markets. Second, we propose a probabilistic model for representing customer preferences within intelligent IS, and we study its performance in electricity tariff and other choice tasks. And third, we propose and study Competitive Benchmarking, a novel research method for effective IS artifact design in complex environments like Smart Grids where the social cost of failure is prohibitive. Our results provide guidance on IS design choices for sustainable electricity systems, and they highlight their potential societal positives and negatives

Semantic discovery and reuse of business process patterns

Patterns currently play an important role in modern information systems (IS) development and their use has mainly been restricted to the design and implementation phases of the development lifecycle. Given the increasing significance of business modelling in IS development, patterns have the potential of providing a viable solution for promoting reusability of recurrent generalized models in the very early stages of development. As a statement of research-in-progress this paper focuses on business process patterns and proposes an initial methodological framework for the discovery and reuse of business process patterns within the IS development lifecycle. The framework borrows ideas from the domain engineering literature and proposes the use of semantics to drive both the discovery of patterns as well as their reuse

Social work with airports passengers

Social work at the airport is in to offer to passengers social services. The main methodological position is that people are under stress, which characterized by a particular set of characteristics in appearance and behavior. In such circumstances passenger attracts in his actions some attention. Only person whom he trusts can help him with the documents or psychologically

The Dynamics of Formal Organization: Essays on bureaucracy and formal rules

Theories of bureaucracy in organization studies constitute a perspective in which formal or written rules are seen as fundamental to the understanding of organization. It is argued, for example, that formal rules facilitate organizational decision-making, establish the basis for coordination and control, and help to increase an organization’s legitimacy within the broader institutional environment. Like other elements of organizations, rules also change over time with potential consequences for decision-making, coordination, and legitimacy. This dissertation takes up questions about the causes of continuity and change of formal organizational rules, as well as of bureaucratic organizational forms more broadly. The first conceptual essay (Chapter 2) starts with the observation that bureaucracy is a remarkably persistent organizational form and suggests that the reproduction or transformation of this form and its prevalence in various organizational fields depends on the agency and interaction of different expert groups. In Chapter 3, we present a conceptual account of the dynamic process of codification and enforcement of formal rules and its influence on the preservation and retrieval of organizational memory via these rules. In Chapter 4, we offer a conceptual account of how the process of using existing formal rules to deal with new organizational problems can ultimately lead to change in such rules. Finally, Chapter 5 reports the results of a longitudinal empirical study of rule changes in UNESCO’s World Heritage Program. We find that that rule makers’ cultural heterogeneity tends to delay rule changes, while rule makers’ normative power tends to accelerate them

Insights from the Inventory of Smart Grid Projects in Europe: 2012 Update

By the end of 2010 the Joint Research Centre, the European Commission’s in-house science service, launched the first comprehensive inventory of smart grid projects in Europe1. The final catalogue was published in July 2011 and included 219 smart grid and smart metering projects from the EU-28 member states, Switzerland and Norway. The participation of the project coordinators and the reception of the report by the smart grid community were extremely positive. Due to its success, the European Commission decided that the project inventory would be carried out on a regular basis so as to constantly update the picture of smart grid developments in Europe and keep track of lessons learnt and of challenges and opportunities. For this, a new on-line questionnaire was launched in March 2012 and information on projects collected up to September 2012. At the same time an extensive search of project information on the internet and through cooperation links with other European research organizations was conducted. The resulting final database is the most up to date and comprehensive inventory of smart grids and smart metering projects in Europe, including a total of 281 smart grid projects and 90 smart metering pilot projects and rollouts from the same 30 countries that were included in the 2011 inventory database. Projects surveyed were classified into three categories: R&D, demonstration or pre-deployment) and deployment, and for the first time a distinction between smart grid and smart metering projects was made. The following is an insight into the 2012 report.JRC.F.3-Energy securit