The Statistical Mechanics of Complex Product Development
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Date
Wednesday, November 2nd, 2005
Time
6:00PM
Speaker
Dan Braha
New England Complex Systems Institute, Cambridge, MA
University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth, MA
Description
In recent years, understanding the structure and function of complex networks has become the foundation for explaining many different real-world complex biological, technological and informal social phenomena. Techniques from statistical physics have been successfully applied to the analysis of these networks, and have uncovered surprising statistical structural properties that have also been shown to have a major effect on their functionality, dynamics, robustness, and fragility.
This paper examines, for the first time, the statistical properties of strategically important organizational networks -- networks of people engaged in distributed product development (PD) -- and discusses the significance of these properties in providing insight into ways of improving the strategic and operational decision-making of the organization. We show that the structure of information flow networks that are at the heart of large-scale product development efforts have properties that are similar to those displayed by other social, biological and technological networks.
In this context, we further identify novel properties that may be characteristic of other information-carrying networks. We further present a detailed model and analysis of PD dynamics on complex networks, and show how the underlying network topologies provide direct information about the characteristics of this dynamics. We believe that our new analysis methodology and empirical results are also relevant to other organizational information-carrying networks. (In collaboration with Yaneer Bar-Yam, New-England Complex Systems Institute).
Speaker Bio
Dan Braha is a Professor at the University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth, and is an affiliate of the New England Complex Systems Institute (NECSI) in Cambridge MA. He was a Visiting Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and a Research Scientist at Boston University. Dan Braha has published extensively in various prestigious journals including Physical Review, IEEE Transactions, Research in Engineering Design, and Management Science. He has also published a book on the foundations of design, a book on data mining, and an edited book on the emerging science of Complex Engineered Systems(forthcoming in 2006), all with Springer Publishers. He has also served as Associate Editor for IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics, and serves as Editorial Board Member for AI EDAM (Cambridge University Press) and Advanced Engineering Informatics (Elsevier).
Location
Best Western Tlc Hotel
477 Totten Pond Road
Waltham, MA 02451
781-890-7800
Cost
INCOSE Members $10
Non members: Free for first meeting
Student members: Free
Payable at the door.
Reservations
Please RSVP to info@incose-ne.org