Agent-based Decision Support System for the Third Generation Dynamic Distributed Decision-making (DDD-III) Simulator*

A. Objectives In this paper, we extend our three-phase organizational design process ([2], [3]), which hypothesizes that congruence between missions and organizations leads to superior organizational performance, to include mission monitoring and dynamic re-planning in order to maintain a desired level of congruence. The dynamic mission monitoring facilitates situation awareness at the team level, which in turn, promotes team collaboration and coordination, and speeds-up the team decision-making processes. The dynamic re-planning allows the organization to maintain (near-) optimal performance in a dynamic, uncertain environment via adjustments to organizational strategies and/or structures. We propose to utilize the third generation Distributed Dynamic Decision-making (DDD-III) simulator [1], which provides a flexible, controllable paradigm for examining the interactions between the mission structure and the way in which the organization tasked to execute the mission is structured, to operationalize the extension. The approach is to augment the DDD-III simulator with the decision-support capabilities via our optimization-based organizational design process embedded as a decision-making agent [5]. This decision support agent provides the organization with the ability to generate robust plans, as well as, the capability to sense unforeseen variations in the mission, analyze them, adjust the plans, and adapt to the changing needs via strategy and structural adjustments.