Test Beds for Complex Systems

Published

January 1, 2005

Author(s)

Albert T. Jones, A S. Deshmukh

Abstract

Global competition requires major manufacturers to increase productivity, quality, and responsiveness while simultaneously decreasing costs and time to market. To achieve these seemingly conflicting requirements, they have expanded the outsourcing trends that began in the late 1980s. Now, design, engineering and logistics, as well as production, are outsourced to companies all over the world. This expansion has resulted in a new organizational structure called the value chain. The members of this chain form a globally distributed system of companies who rely completely on the timely and error-free exchange of information. The availability of this information is crucial for making good decisions at every level in the chain. Many of these decisions are formulated as optimization problems, which are solved using commercial software applications. These applications assume that required inputs are either stored locally or available from other members. They further assume that inputs are current, accurate, and meaningful. Current computing technologies can assure information currency, but they cannot assure accuracy and meaning.

Citation

Special Issue of Communications of the ACM on Complex Adaptive Enterprises

Pub Type

Journals

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Keywords

complex systems, distributed systems, manufacturing, Test Bed, value chain, XML

Citation

Jones, A. and Deshmukh, A. (2005), Test Beds for Complex Systems, Special Issue of Communications of the ACM on Complex Adaptive Enterprises, [online], https://tsapps.nist.gov/publication/get_pdf.cfm?pub_id=822229 (Accessed December 26, 2024)