Multi-Functional Software Environment for Modeling Complex Missions and Devising Adaptive Organizations

摘要

This paper presents a software environment that uses the authors' comprehensive modeling and design methodology for representing complex missions and synthesizing the concomitant adaptive organizational structures for different sets of design objectives. The tool box provides a step-by-step visualization of modeling a complex mission and building an 'optimal' organization that achieves superior performance while satisfying organizational constraints. In addition, the software environment allows one to perform a comparative analysis of different organizations for various (user-defined) performance measures, and to quantify the robustness of a given organizational design. The methodology incorporates algorithms for optimizing resource allocation, mission scheduling, information management, balancing decision- making workload, and maximizing controllability of mission processing by the resulting organizational hierarchy. The software environment is illustrated via an example. The methodology and tools presented allow for automation of the modeling and design process. Herein, they constitute valuable instruments for scientific research in the area of organizational decision-making and human team behavior.