e3value user guide

Chapter 5
Quantification

This chapter describes the quantification capabilities of the e3value tool. This has not yet been implemented in the e3web tool.

To quantify an e3value model, you specify how many times value transfers occur in a contract period, and what the value of the transfered value objects for the participating actors is. We call a quantification of the model elements a market scenario. Remember that a contract period is the period of time represented by an e3value model. A market scenario contains the quantifications for one contract period.

If the e3value model represents an existing value network, the numbers in a market scenario can be based on historical data. If the e3value model represents a possible future network, the numbers in a market scenario are estimates of future behavior. In both cases, modeling existing or new business ideas, quantification is a great way to analyze and debug the the model. In addition, to test sensitivity of a value network to differences in market conditions, you typically create several market scenarios to see how the value network behaves under different conditions.

To count value transfers and assign value to transferred value objects, we need to set properties of some of the elements of a model.

We use the model of figure 5.1 as running example in this chapter.

Figure 5.1:Running example. 100 000 Travelers each have 10 travel needs, in 50% of which they buy food three times. The labels “vi92” and “vi78” in the comments are arbitrary labels assigned by the editor to the value interfaces of Travelers.
 5.1 Properties
 5.2 Customer need occurrences
 5.3 Sizing market segments
 5.4 Quantifying or-dependencies
 5.5 Cardinality dependencies
 5.6 Same-object bundling
  5.6.1 Port cardinalities
  5.6.2 Value transfer cardinalities
  5.6.3 Where to specify same-object bundling?
 5.7 Transaction choice ratios
  5.7.1 Transaction dependency
 5.8 Valuations of a value transfer
  5.8.1 Money transfers
  5.8.2 Non-money transfers
 5.9 Expenses
 5.10 Investments
 5.11 Computing property values