literature and hints on interesting publications; Professor Hartmut Stadtler for d- cussing the amount of updates and revisions; and finally Katharina Wetzel-Vandai from Springer, who made the second edition possible, and gave all the necessary technical support to achieve this undergoing. Mainz, October 2008 Gregor Dudek Preface to the First Edtion The following dissertation is the outcome of a three-year research effort at the - partment of Production and Supply Chain Management of the Darmstadt Univ- sity of Technology. When this work started in mid of 2000, the term "Collaborative Planning" was about to gain popularity, especially in practitioner-oriented publications on Supply Chain Management. Yet, in searching these publications for answers to questions of how a Collaborative Planning process should actually look like, or which goals and objectives it should serve, one quickly found that most contributions only scratched at the surface of Collaborative Planning. Most frequently, discussions focused on the technological means available for the exchange of information - tween independent Supply Chain partners, such as Email, Web-interfaces, or the XML technology.