|   | CMU-ISRI-04-102 Institute for Software Research International
 School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University
 
    
     
 CMU-ISRI-04-102
 
A Network Optimization Approach forImproving Organizational Design
 
Kathleen M. Carley, Natalia Y. Kamneva 
January 2004  
Institute for Software Research International (ISRI)Center for Computational Analaysis of Social and Organizational Systems (CASOS)
 
CMU-ISRI-04-102.psCMU-ISRI-04-102.pdf
 Keywords: Optimizer, optimization, Monte Carlo, simulated annealing, 
multi-criteria optimization, global optimum, multivariate functions, 
dynamic network analysis, social network analysis
 Organizations are frequently designed and redesigned, often in 
efforts to improve performance or meet various managerial goals 
for coordination and communication. Such design is often done 
through the review of a few of options and the use of managerial 
and possibly personnel insight into how the new design might work. 
In contrast, we provide a systematic optimization based approach. 
In this approach, the user can pick one or more Dynamic Network 
Analysis (DNA) metrics and then use one or more of the available 
optimizers to find a design that more closely meets this ideal. 
The optimizer utilizes heuristic based optimization procedures 
to generate an optimized organizational design given a particular 
mission. DNA metrics, such as Communication Congruence, Resource 
Congruence, Cognitive Load, and Actual Workload, serve to define 
criteria. The Optimizer can perform multi-criteria optimization in 
order to improve several metrics simultaneously. Two optimization 
methods can be used   Monte Carlo and Simulated Annealing, both of 
which are statistical methods of finding a global optimum. DNA 
metrics used in the optimizations are computed by ORA. This 
report describes this optimizer.
 
24 pages 
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