Complex Organizational System A Complex System Model for Organizations, Companies and Social Actions

The Model Basics Objects are the elements that populate and perform the work of the complex system. Tasks specify work to be done by objects. Policy is a course of action selected in light of given conditions to guide, modify and determine activities in the complex system. Context is the environment, the inputs, the systems and the events that surround the complex system. Collaboration is an essential part of organizational work. It takes on many forms, team formation, negotiation and straightforward collaboration.

Goals Refine the model to explain, simulate and reason about a variety of organizations and social events Constructing engines for small complex systems is simple Constructing engines for larger complex systems is feasible and methods to accommodate them are demonstrated The model is generalized to include different types of complex systems such as more social frameworks, biological and physical systems. Each of the engines is well understood and bounded

The architecture of the system model

System Organization Unstructured objects - Some complex systems contain or consist of unstructured objects. Team - Team formation is an important organizational step where objects come together to perform a collaborative task or tasks. Hierarchies of objects - Hierarchies imply a parenting or supervisory role for objects at a higher level in the hierarchy. Objects within objects - An object may contain other objects.

Tasks The task is as the basic unit of work. Task management allocates, performs and completes tasks within a complex system. Task dependency supports parallel and sequential performance of tasks. Activities contain one or more tasks that may be independent or dependent on each other. Tasks may be comprised of subtasks. An object may perform a task by itself or several objects collaborate in performing a single task.

Tasks Details Directed Task Allocation –Directed task performance assumes that the task issuer has the authority to issue a task. In this case, the task either preempts the tasks being performed or it is performed after the currently executing task is completed. Negotiated Task Allocation –Non-Allocated task assignment is negotiated. Negotiation is described in the Collaboration Engine section. Actions –Actions are activities that do not perform work. For example, object recruitment and negotiation during team formation consist of multiple actions.

Policy Rules The general policy rule is a statement R of the form: R: if conjunction of predicates then conjunction of actions

Types Operation Constraint Rules (OCR). Rules that specify conditions that must hold before and after an operation. Stimulus-Response Rules (SRR). This is a temporal version of OCR. Computation Rules (CR). These rules are used to derive results.

Policy Rules Examples IF number of customers = recommended number of employees THEN Dismiss Employee IF fryer oil age > 1 month AND time == early morning OR time == late evening AND number of working fryers > 1 THEN Change Oil IF customer purchase > $100 THEN discount order by %10 IF employee late days > 3 THEN Discipline Employee

Policy Computation Policy rules are placed in a rule repository. The Policy Rule Engine (PRE) feeds off a subset of the rule repository. It enforces and maintains rules and communicates with policy rule engines. Enforcing policy implies a network of engines each with its subset repository working in conjunction with each other.

Rule search with i PREs

The Context of Policy Policy Rules are declarative statements with the general form of policy rules. An intervention of the context engine is desired when a policy rule if A then B and the environment indicates that the action was B despite –A being true. The context engine may find that the effect is as if we had: if A or X then B, where X is another predicate.

Context Types Operation Constraint Rule (OCR) – Example: an airplane can take off if it is ready. Assume that it is a new type of airplane for which new policy is not available yet and this type of airplane can take off even if is not completely ready. Stimulus-Response Rules (SSR) – Example: On 9/11/2001 there was no policy dealing with hijacked airplane flying over Manhattan. At the very least context engines should report a problem. Computation Rules – Examples: assume computation of mortgage interest rate. –Potential changes by the context engine: –Add 1% due to company losses –Interest rate 5%

Collaboration Negotiated Task Allocation Task assignment is negotiated. An object initiates the task and becomes the Task Initiator (TI). A TI generates a Task Announcement (TA) that contains the parameters required to perform the task. The TA is distributed to all relevant objects. Objects able to perform the task respond to the TA with a bid. TI evaluates bids received accepting the best bid or deferring bid evaluation until more bids are received. Once the bids are evaluated, the task is awarded employing a two-phase commit protocol to ensure award completion (Fig. 3). Once the task is awarded, the awarded object notifies the TI of task progress and eventual completion.