Simulation Gaming to Study Design and Management Decision-Making in Flexible Engineering Systems

This paper reports on the development of a simulation gaming platform to study the dynamics of decision making when multiple stakeholders are tasked to design and manage a flexible engineering system. Flexibility in design and management provides the "right, but not the obligation, to change a system in the face of uncertainty." This approach shows clear lifecycle performance improvements for complex systems, as compared to standard design and management approaches. The process of enabling and managing flexibility involves many stakeholders at different levels of the decision-making process. Decisions at a higher level (e.g. system owner, client) impact the decision space available to other stakeholders down the line (e.g. system designers, operators), which affects the ability to respond to change. Managing different sources of flexibility in operations is challenging, especially when subjected to economic and/or legal constraints, information asymmetry, different uncertainty sources, and other agency problems between the stakeholders. The simulation gaming platform provides a way to devise, study, and evaluate the effectiveness of training and other uncertainty management techniques experimentally to help stakeholders better design and manage complex systems under uncertainty. Results of preliminary experiments are shown in the context of an urban emergency services system.