Investigation of responsible decision-making for sustainable value management in distributed co-production networks

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

Many corporations are disaggregating their operations and 'fine-slicing' their global value chains, governments are decentralizing their decision-making processes, and security organizations are dispersing their operations over time and space. Today, supply chains are no longer straightforward chains but often complex networks with many actors involved in the production, processing, transportation, retailing, and waste management throughout the product's life-cycles. The COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated mutual dependencies as most businesses are hugely reliant on production and supplies worldwide. Distributed operations is not unique to the business sector, but military and security organizations have adopted dispersed operations to execute complex missions. As organizations seek to improve and adapt, they are forced to rethink their operations and decision-making along distributed networks. A distributed co-production network (CPN) is a cluster of self-organized and vertically related but relatively independent organizations with limited awareness of each other's goals and capabilities (e.g., capacity, labour, knowledge or technology). Moreover, as we became aware of the urgency of climate change and social responsibility, organizations are adopting sustainability and the UN Sustainable Development Goals. Decision-making occurs at and across, operational, intra-organizational, inter-organizational, and extra-organizational levels of a focal organization. However, our understanding of distributed decision-making within sustainable CPNs is still lagging. Existing systems and technologies are not adequately supporting decision-making in sustainable CPN. In particular, responsible decision-support theories and algorithms are needed to manage value sustainably along CPNs when value creation, transfer and distribution among diverse co-production actors are multi-dimensional, pluralistic and dynamic. Responsible decision-making recognizes the plurality of stakeholders' perspectives. Decisions should explicitly consider multiple criteria and reconcile their conflicts as single-objective decision-making leads to non-Pareto decisions. Responsible decision-making should also account for the dynamics of the value creation dynamics over time and across territories. I intend to investigate responsible decision technologies for distributed settings such as sustainable CPNs, dispersed operations and global supply chains. I plan to contribute a decision-making theory for managing sustainable value aggregation, and several decision support algorithms based on mult-criteria decision analysis, measurement theory, machine learning and data analytics. I will use multi-agent modelling and simulation to validate the proposed theoretical and algorithmic developments. This research program will contribute to the advancement of responsible management sciences, artificial intelligence and M&S to manage distributed decision-making for sustainable value management.