Universiteit Twente (UT) • Business & IT

Summaries for these papers: * Computers play the beer game: can artificial agents manage supply chains? * A Consensus-Based Algorithm for Truck Platooning * Real-Time Coordination in Container Trucking – Prototyping and Evaluating a Multi-Agent System for RealTime Container Truck Planning at Post-Kogeko * An Agent-Based Simulation Framework to Evaluate Urban Logistics Schemes Plus summaries for every lecture slide as given in the 2017/18 edition of the Multi-Agent Systems course at the Unive...

Semi And unstructured databases

This paper discusses the approaches to risk management. It also identifies risk factors in an Australian state's project management practice, and subsequently identifies that project types matters in determining the importance of factors.

The authors sketch that IT projects still fail regardless of significant progress in the field of risk management. However, they argue that risk management in general and risk factors in particular is grounded in wrong assumptions: project managers cannot know in advance which risks will happen and what their probabilities are. Consequently, they suggest a holistic risk assessment approach combined to a contingency approach for managing the risk. They illustrate project improvements achieved aft...

Contemporary organisations use Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) to measure the effectiveness of their IT expenditures. Maximising this effectiveness requires spending less without impacting IT operations. The authors of this article argue that retaining service levels while reducing costs can be done in two ways: through centralisation and standardisation of IT. Yet, there are many caveats, which are also treated in this article.

Managerial practice often only scantily realises that applications result in high production and further development costs. Managers focus too much on initial development costs versus net benefits. In this study, the authors aim to provide an overview of costs over the application lifecycle; shed a light on available data with regards to costs; and stress the distribution of work over internal business and external consultants.

Various models exist that suggest how much effort should be put in a certain phase of a software development project. As these models vary greatly in these effort percentages, practitioners are confused and ignore the models. This study conjectures that models vary because they do not take into account factors that create variance. The authors subsequently perform empirical research in Chinese projects to identify these factors and provide some interesting results.

Using the Balanced Scorecard, organisations can both enhance their way of working whilst improving financial performance. This summary describes the four quadrants as well as a bit of history regarding traditional financial analysis, as described by Kaplan and Norton in their original HBR submission.

In 'The economics of railway safety' beschrijft Evans de stand van zaken omtrent treinveiligheid in verschillende landen; beschrijft hij waarom cost-benefit-analyses vaak niet worden gehonoreerd bij het implementeren van maatregelen die de treinveiligheid verbeteren; geeft hij voorbeelden van dergelijke maatregelen.

Both macro-economic research and micro-economic, firm-level investigations into IT spendings and subsequent productivity increase yield inconsistent results. Oz sketches why this is difficult as well as proposes hints towards more proper work.