: Specialty contractors (SCs) are construction's `job shops'. They must allocate their resources to match the various `delivery' dates demanded by multiple projects. Managing the production of a specialty contracting firm is, consequently, quite different from managing a project. Further, specialty contractor management depends upon the quality of production management on projects, i.e., their coordination by general contractors. Unfortunately, there is a trend among general contractors to adopt a brokering role and neglect coordination. This paper presents the production and control tasks of both specialty and general contractors through the use of process models, emphasizing the responsibility of SCs for design completion and the mutual interdependence of SCs on design changes and installation accuracy. Lean production principles are recommended and CPM is critiqued as inadequate for SC coordination. INTRODUCTION Specialty contractors (SCs) perform construction work that re...

by The Virtual Design Team (VDT) extends and operationalizes Galbraith’s (1973) information-processing view of organizations. VDT simulates the micro-level information processing, communication and coordination behavior of participants in a project organization and predicts several measures of participant and project-level performance. VDT-1 (Cohen, 1991) and VDT-2 (Christiansen, 1993) modeled project organizations containing actors with perfectly congruent goals engaged in complex but routine engineering design work within static organization structures. VDT-3 extends the VDT-2 work process representation to include measures of activity flexibility, complexity, uncertainty, and interdependence strength. It explicitly models the effects of goal incongruency between agents on their information processing and communication behavior while executing more flexible tasks. These extensions allow VDT to model more flexible organizations executing less routine work processes. VDT thus bridges rigorously between cognitive and social psychological micro-organization theory and sociological and economic macro-organization theory for project teams. VDT-3 has been used to model and simulate the design of two major subsystems of a complex satellite launch vehicle. This case study provides initial evidence that the micro-contingency theory embodied in VDT-3 can be used to predict organizational breakdowns, and to evaluate alternative organizational changes to mitigate

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Knowledge management (KM) represents a topic of considerable current interest. However, the majority of extant KM research treats knowledge as a static object that can be acquired, stored and retrieved through information technology. Two fundamental problems emerge from this current majority view: (1) many scholars view knowledge as distinct from information, and (2) very little attention is paid to the dynamics of knowledge—a phenomenon which many scholars term “knowledge flows. ” In this article we build upon a steady stream of research in computational organization theory to develop agent-based models of knowledge flows. Such models draw from emerging theory for multidimensional representation of the knowledge flow phenomenon, and they enable the dynamics of enterprise knowledge flows to be formalized and simulated through computational models. We illustrate this research approach and modeling environment through formal representation and simulation of knowledge flows from the domain of information systems design. 1.

In this paper we examine the adaptability of the Japanese style lean organization system and the traditional American style mass organization system under changing environments. From an organizational design perspective, key structural aspects of the two organizations are modeled in a problem solving context using computational methods. Organizational-level performance in terms of decision making accuracy and severity of errors is measured as an indicator of organizational adaptability under conditions where the task environment shifts between predictable to unpredictable or vise versa. Our study shows that both organizations have their respective advantages under different task environments and that they adapt to environmental shifts in different forms. Specifically, when the time pressure is high the lean organization system’s performance is virtually identical to the mass organization system, even though the lean organization system’s members are more proactive. When the time pressure is low, the mass organization system shows a much faster adaptability when the environment shifts to a predictable one but it is also more vulnerable when the environment shifts to an unpredictable one. In contrast, the lean organization system’s response to the changing environment is characterized by its slower adaptability. When the environment shifts to an unpredictable one, the lean organization system shows a gradual improvement till reaching a high level. When the environment shifts to a predictable one, however, the lean organization system shows a gradual

Organizational simulations have been used in business, manufacturing, and engineering design tasks to gain insight into organizational process bottlenecks, and to improve the quality and efficiency of processes within these industries. As market pressures demand increased efficiencies within the health care industry, organizational simulation techniques could provide similar insight into the design of better medical care processes, or protocols, in medical organizations. To simulate the process of medical care within a specific organization however, requires models that can represent 1) unpredictable patient responses to care, 2) the flexibility needed to adapt to different patients, and 3) different preferences of health care professionals and the implicit preferences contained within the protocol. Using previous work on simulation in the Virtual Design Team (VDT), and an example protocol drawn from an existing protocol in bone marrow transplantation, we describe extensions to the VDT information processing representation that will allow us to simulate the performance characteristics of a medical protocol used within a medical organization. Our representational extensions capture the uncertainty of medical care for patients, the activity flexibility within the organization, and the preferences of health care professionals that will make information processing organizational simulations in the medical domain possible. We believe our representation will provide a robust simulation "toolbox" that can be used to investigate the performance of specific medical protocols within different hospital settings, and explore organizational theory within the health care industry.

Comparing computational models is an important method for building scientific knowledge about the design, construction, and modification of computational models. The model comparison process, however, is not well worked through. We illustrate a method of model comparison referred to as model alignment, or ‘docking,’ using two computational models of organizational design and evaluation, Docking serves three purposes, 1) To illuminate implicit assumptions, 2) to determine the points of similarity and differences in the models, and 3) to determine the ways that the models can be used in a complementary fashion. Results underscore how implementation differences between models can affect their outcome measures.

this paper, we motivate and report simulation experiments within a canonical task environment to assess the benefits from introducing richer organizational structures to control essentially simple but fallible robot-type agents. The sort of situation we have in mind would be a team of robots cleaning the floor and at the same time monitoring inside a museum during the night (such robots, at least as single systems, exist). Each of them can sense and act in a variety of ways and work independently. Each robot has a map of the museum but is "responsible" for a particular area,

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Simulation modeling provides a powerful methodology for advancing theory and research on complex behaviors and systems, yet it has been embraced more slowly in management than in some associated social science disciplines. We suspect that part of the reason is that simulation methods are not well understood. We therefore aim to promote understanding of simulation methodology and to develop an appreciation of its potential contributions to management theory by describing the nature of simulations, its attractions, and its special problems, as well as some uses of computational modeling in management research.