Abstract
The Landauer-Büttiker approach is used to describe electron transport along a chain of scatterers which allow elastic as well as inelastic processes. The inelastic scattering takes place via side branches, coupling the chain to electron reservoirs which serve as a heat bath. In this approach, coherent and dissipative transport can be treated in a unified manner, and the suppression of quantum coherence effects for increasing coupling to the heat bath can be described. The influence of disorder on the transmission properties can be characterized by an appropriate coherence length in addition to the decay of the coherence due to dissipation.