Proceedings of the Fifth Asia Pacific Industrial Engineering and Management Systems Conference 2004 COLLECTIVE WORK IN DYNAMIC INTER-ORGANIZATIONAL SCHEDULING

Abstract

Inter-organizational scheduling is a process, where two or more organizations coordinate activities for mutual benefits. Decision making in such an environment is a multi-criteria, multi-party practice, including cooperation between parties. It is characterized by distributed, dynamic, ill-defined and conflicting information. As this information is in the form of tacit knowledge, its efficient transference between organizations is not possible through databases and computer-supported tools. Therefore human collective work remains a key factor in interorganizational scheduling. This, comprising interaction between human operators, algorithms, software, and autonomous agents implies a need for structural and functional concepts. In this paper, inter-organizational dynamic collective work is studied using a cognitive-based analysis. Our aim is to identify the key factors affecting the process. Through a comparative review of the literature, it is argued that cooperative processes, involving coordination mechanisms, are one component of collaborative states in collective works in scheduling between organizations. In such a way, in collaborative scheduling, group and domain knowledge and tasks, group knowledge, group decision processes, and cooperative activities play a key role. This approach can contribute in system analysis, (re) design, and evaluation as well as designing computer supports in inter-organizational scheduling