Page 298 - Mechatronics for Safety, Security and Dependability in a New Era

Ch57-I044963.fm Page 282 Tuesday, August 1, 2006 4:10 PM
Ch57-I044963.fm
282
282 Page 282 Tuesday, August 1, 2006 4:10 PM
play to their capabilities from each and every perspective with full sense of fulfilment and satisfaction
(Yamada, 2002).
In the PSIM project (Van Eijnatten, Ed., 2002) both a procedure and dedicated software were devel-
oped and tested in five companies in Europe, Japan and the US. The PSIM participative simulation pro-
totype (Little et al., 2001; Bovenkamp et al., 2002) supports companies in developing new organiza-
tional structures in which humans can perform healthier and better. The participating companies
evaluated PSIM positively as a 'breakthrough' innovation in the field of business and work.

A virtual plant environment (Goossenaerts et al., 2002; Matsuo & Matsuoka, 2004; Shin et al., 2004) is
an advanced information environment that supports operations, decision-making and transformations in
the factory. The drivers for the decision-making increasingly stem from the public domain and are
characterized by a growing range of concerns such as quality, safety and health, environment friend-
liness, security, etc. In the ideal case, the objectives or functional requirements that govern the factory's
evolution are aligned with economic and sustainability objectives for capital assets in the ecosystem.
The integral effect of this alignment activity on the factory is mediated by the reflective activities of
governance, management, and design & analysis.
Factory governance systems that adhere to the principles of Socio-Technical Systems Design - pre-
dominantly autonomy and self-regulation - are better harnessed to align factory operations with the
evolving development goals articulated in the ecosystem. It is a challenge to find a proper balance be-
tween self-regulation by human agents and control by enacted systems. In this paper the relationship
between ecosystem development goals and reflective activities in the factory are explored. On both
sides, interesting insights are gained. Factory Governance requires an intensive collaboration among
agents at the scales of human, business and the public domain. A comprehensive methodology to derive
human profiles that can support human operations with shifting objectives in advanced factory govern-
ance systems draws on three bodies of knowledge: (i) Institutional Analysis and Development (IAD)
Framework (Ostrom, 1990/1994); (ii) A Decomposition Approach for Manufacturing System Design
(Cochran et al., 2001); and (iii) A Decisional Reference Model.

It is assumed that a management activity derives new objectives for governing activity systems (in the
factory) that it can influence by choices for certain decision variables.

ECOSYSTEM, CAPITAL, AND INDICATOR SYSTEMS

The firm exists in an ecosystem. The economic behavior of firms and other agents and the distribution
of assets among them involve mechanisms that allocate society's resources among their many alterna-
tive uses. Whereas the ecosystem is not as designable as the firm, approaches exist to make it intelligi-
ble, as regards its links to resources and capital, and to influence the ways in which capital is affected
by it. An example of such an approach is the Institutional Analysis and Development (IAD) framework
(Ostrom, 1990). IAD is a framework for designing policy experiments, empirically tested theories and
models linking institutions and the sustainability of common-pool resource systems (Ostrom et al.,
1994). The IAD framework has a systematic theoretical focus on the impact of rules and norms on indi-
vidual incentives in complex ecological-economic systems and accounts for dynamic system interac-
tions at multiple tiers of analysis. In the variant of this framework that Rudd (2004) developed, five
types of capital assets are specifically included: Natural Capital, Manufactured Capital, Human Capi-
tal, Social Capital, and Financial Capital.

Each capital asset is composed of a 'stock' that provides a 'flow' of value, goods and services that peo-
ple can use to help them meet objectives and achieve their aspirations. The flow characteristics of the
different kinds of capital vary strongly. Financial Capital for instance represents obligations, and is liq-
uidated as money for trade, and owned by legal entities. Capital assets are the primary referent for indi-