Actor based behavioural simulation as an aid for organisational decision making

Decision-making is a critical activity for most of the modern organizations to stay competitive in rapidly changing business environment. Effective organisational decision-making requires deep understanding of various organisational aspects such as its goals, structure, business-as-usual operational processes, environment where it operates, and inherent characteristics of the change drivers that may impact the organisation. The size of a modern organisation, its socio-technical characteristics, inherent uncertainty, volatile operating environment, and prohibitively high cost of the incorrect decisions make decision-making a challenging endeavor. While the enterprise modelling and simulation technologies have evolved into a mature discipline for understanding a range of engineering, defense and control systems, their application in organisational decision-making is considerably low. Current organisational decision-making approaches that are prevalent in practice are largely qualitative. Moreover, they mostly rely on human experts who are often aided with the primitive technologies such as spreadsheets and visual diagrams. This thesis argues that the existing modelling and simulation technologies are neither suitable to represent organisation and decision artifacts in a comprehensive and machine-interpretable form nor do they comprehensively address the analysis needs. An approach that advances the modelling abstraction and analysis machinery for organisational decision-making is proposed. In particular, this thesis proposes a domain specific language to represent relevant aspects of an organisation for decision-making, establishes the relevance of a bottom-up simulation technique as a means for analysis, and introduces a method to utilise the proposed modelling abstraction, analysis technique, and analysis machinery in an effective and convenient manner

A domain specific language for complex dynamic decision making

Effective decision making of organisation requires deep understanding of various organisational aspects such as its goals, structure, business-as-usual operational processes in the context of dynamic, socio-technical and uncertain business envi-ronment. Decision making approaches adopt a range of modelling and analysis techniques for effective decision making. The current state-of-practice of deci-sion-making typically relies heavily on human experts using intuition aided by ad-hoc representation of an organisation. Existing technologies for decision mak-ing are not able to represent all constructs that are needed for effective decision making nor do they comprehensively address the analysis needs. This paper pro-poses a meta-model to represent organisation and decision artifacts in a compre-hensive, relatable and analysable form that serves as a basis for a domain specific language (DSL) for complex dynamic decision making. The efficacy of the pro-posed meta-model as regards specification and analysis is evaluated using a real-life scenario

A model based approach for complex dynamic decision-making

Current state-of-the-practice and state-of-the-art of decision-making aids are inadequate for modern organisations that deal with significant uncertainty and business dynamism. This paper highlights the limitations of prevalent decision-making aids and proposes a model-based approach that advances the modelling abstraction and analysis machinery for complex dynamic decision-making. In particular, this paper proposes a meta-model to comprehensively represent organisation, establishes the relevance of model-based simulation technique as analysis means, introduces the advancements over actor technology to address analysis needs, and proposes a method to utilise proposed modelling abstraction, analysis technique, and analysis machinery in an effective and convenient manner. The proposed approach is illustrated using a near real-life case-study from a business process outsourcing organisation

OrgML - a domain specific language for organisational decision-making

Effective decision-making based on precise understanding of an organisation is critical for modern organisations to stay competitive in a dynamic and uncertain business environment. However, the state-of-the-art technologies that are relevant in this context are not adequate to capture and quantitatively analyse complex organisations. This paper discerns the necessary information for an organisational decision-making from management viewpoint, discusses inadequacy of the existing enterprise modelling and specification techniques, proposes a domain specific language to capture the necessary information in machine processable form, and demonstrates how the collected information can be used for a simulation-based evidence-driven organisational decision-making

OrgML - a domain specific language for organisational decision-making

Effective decision-making based on precise understanding of an organisation is critical for modern organisations to stay competitive in a dynamic and uncertain business environment. However, the state-of-the-art technologies that are relevant in this context are not adequate to capture and quantitatively analyse complex organisations. This paper discerns the necessary information for an organisational decision-making from management viewpoint, discusses inadequacy of the existing enterprise modelling and specification techniques, proposes a domain specific language to capture the necessary information in machine processable form, and demonstrates how the collected information can be used for a simulation-based evidence-driven organisational decision-making

A model based realisation of actor model to conceptualise an aid for complex dynamic decision-making

Effective decision-making of modern organisation requires deep understanding of various aspects of organisation such as its goals, structure, business-as-usual operational processes etc. The large size and complex structure of organisations, socio-technical characteristics, and fast business dynamics make this decision-making a challenging endeavour. The state-of-practice of decision-making that relies heavily on human experts is often reported as ineffective, imprecise and lacking in agility. This paper evaluates a set of candidate technologies and makes a case for using actor based simulation techniques as an aid for complex dynamic decision-making. The approach is justified by enumeration of basic requirements of complex dynamic decision-making and the conducting a suitability of analysis of state-of-the-art enterprise modelling techniques. The research contributes a conceptual meta-model that represents necessary aspects of organisation for complex dynamic decision-making together with a realisation in terms of a meta model that extends Actor model of computation. The proposed approach is illustrated using a real life case study from business process outsourcing industr

A model based realisation of actor model to conceptualise an aid for complex dynamic decision-making

Effective decision-making of modern organisation requires deep understanding of various aspects of organisation such as its goals, structure, business-as-usual operational processes etc. The large size and complex structure of organisations, socio-technical characteristics, and fast business dynamics make this decision-making a challenging endeavour. The state-of-practice of decision-making that relies heavily on human experts is often reported as ineffective, imprecise and lacking in agility. This paper evaluates a set of candidate technologies and makes a case for using actor based simulation techniques as an aid for complex dynamic decision-making. The approach is justified by enumeration of basic requirements of complex dynamic decision-making and the conducting a suitability of analysis of state-of-the-art enterprise modelling techniques. The research contributes a conceptual meta-model that represents necessary aspects of organisation for complex dynamic decision-making together with a realisation in terms of a meta model that extends Actor model of computation. The proposed approach is illustrated using a real life case study from business process outsourcing industr

An actor based simulation driven digital twin for analyzing complex business systems

Modern enterprises aim to achieve their business goals while operating in a competitive and dynamic environment. This requires that these enterprises need be efficient, adaptive and amenable for continuous transformation. However, identifying effective control measures, adaptation choices and transformation options for a specific enterprise goal is often both a challenging and expensive task for most of the complex enterprises. The construction of a high-fidelity digital-twin to evaluate the efficacy of a range of control measures, adaptation choices and transformation options is considered to be a cost effective approach for engineering disciplines. This paper presents a novel approach to analogously utilise the concept of digital twin in controlling and adapting large complex business enterprises, and demonstrates its efficacy using a set of adaptation scenarios of a large university

A method for effective use of enterprise modelling techniques in complex dynamic decision making

Effective organisational decision-making requires information pertaining to various organisational aspects, precise analysis capabilities, and a systematic method to capture and interpret the required information. The existing Enterprise Modelling (EM) and actor technologies together seem suitable for the specification and analysis needs of decision making. However, in absence of a method to capture required information and perform analyses, the decision-making remains a complex endeavour. This paper presents a method that captures required information in the form of models and performs what-if calculations in a systematic manner