Coordination with Constrained Resources; A Modeling Framework

Many of today´s large scale systems require dynamic coordination among distributed decisionmakers. A crucial element in the coordination involves the use of resources which have finite setup times and are constrained by their effective durations. The presence of these constraints may induce human cognitive limitations and biases and lead to coordination failure. This paper presents a quantitative methodology for identifying the impact of resource constraints on distributed team coordination in a dynamic and uncertain task processing environment. The approach uses Petri net as the formalism to model team decisionmaking process. By incorporating rational decisionmaking strategies and recognizable human limitations, various resource and task conditions are simulated. Hypotheses on the impact of resource constraints are then generated based on simulation results, and a distributed human team task processing experiment has been designed and conducted to help validate the hypotheses. Experimental data are currently being analyzed, and model-data comparison will help examine the impact of the resource constraints on human team decisionmaking and coordination processes, and identify human cognitive limitations and biases.