Distributed Information Systems in Business

This book gives answers to the question how distributed information systems can serve management, especially lean management. The authors develop new theoretical insights for the future of decentralized firms and offer concepts for creating and maintaining distributed information systems. The book contains interesting prototypes in logistics and financial industries and shows designs and applications of workflow systems. It offers a state-of-the-art survey of the subject.

Managing Distributed Information Systems.- Theoretical Section.- INCOME/STAR: Facing the Challenges for Cooperative Information System Development Environments.- A Business Process Oriented Approach to Data Integration.- Solving Decision Problems by Distributed Decomposition and Delegation — Foundations of a Theory and its Application within a Normative Group Decision Support System Framework.- Distributed Cooperative Budget-planning and -control.- Decentralized Problem Solving in Logistics with Partly Intelligent Agents and Comparison with Alternative Approaches.- Organizational Multi-Agent Systems: A Process Driven Approach.- Development and Simulation of Methods for Scheduling and Coordinating Decentralized Job Shops Using Multi-Computer Systems.- Distributed Environments for Evolutionary Algorithms by means of Multi-Agent Applications.- Application Section.- Multi-Layered Development of Business Process Models and Distributed Business Application Systems - An Object-Oriented Approach.- Computer Support for Distributed Information Management Tasks (CUVIMA).- The GroupFlow Framework: Enterprise Model and Architecture of the Workflow System.- ALLFIWIB: Customer Consulting in Financial Services with Distributed Knowledge Based Systems.- A Generic Approach for Computer-Assistance of Complex Decision Processes.- Group Scheduling — Methods and Tools for Distributed Scheduling Processes in a Corporate Environment.- Modeling Knowledge about Long-term IS Integration and Integration-oriented Reengineering with KADS.- Addresses of the Authors.