Global Decision Making Support for Complex System Development

To succeed with the development of modern and complex systems (e.g., aircrafts or production systems), organizations must have the agility to adapt faster to constantly evolving requirements in order to deliver more reliable and optimized solutions that can be adapted to the needs and environments of their stakeholders including users, customers, suppliers, and partners. However, stakeholders do not have sufficiently explicit and systematic support for global decision making, considering the vast decision space and complex inter-relationships. This decision space is characterized by increasing yet inadequately represented variability and the uncertainty of the impact of decisions on stakeholders and the solution space. This leads to an ad-hoc decision making process that is slow, error-prone, and often favors local knowledge over global, organization-wide objectives. As a result, one team's design decisions may impose too restrictive requirements on another team. In this paper, we evaluate our understanding of global decision making in the context of complex system development based on a conceptual model which explicitly represents and manages decision spaces including variability and impacts. We have conducted our evaluation by means of an exploratory case study where we interviewed domain experts with an average of 20 years of experience in complex system industries and report the key findings and remaining challenges. In the future, we aim at providing explicit and systematic tool-supported approaches for global decision making support for complex systems.