7.1.1. The “enabling” environment for Information and Decision Systems

On the basis of decision-making strategies, a physical structure can be put in place and an information system architecture can be designed and implemented. In an organization, a population or a company, several architectures can be identified and implemented in their related decision-making systems. We first make a distinction between:

• – Centralized Systems: where the company’s various business processes, from research to operation, are entirely managed by the head office, also known as the Main Decision Center.
• – Duplicate Systems: here, research and development is carried out at the company’s headquarters, near the Decision Center, but production and operation are divided between geographically autonomous distributed units. The same applies to technical and financial management systems.
• – Decentralized Systems: where each autonomous unit or entity in the system retains the opportunity to design and operate its own products and services. This approach is intended to best meet the local needs and constraints of the socio-economic environment.
• – Network Systems: where R&D and the production and exploitation of goods and services are divided between different autonomous entities. However, if operating in Peer to Peer mode, all activities are integrated and coordinated by the Headquarters’ Main Decision Center (the “Headquarters”).

7.1.2. The structural environment

As a result, structures are emerging in the company’s information and decision-making system. However, it is important to highlight the presence of certain factors or contexts that will influence the entrepreneur and decision-makers in the choice of the organization to be set up. Currently, in our economy, there are some major trends that we can list [LAU 01].

They mainly concern the company’s field of action as well as the way in which business is conducted:

• – National exporter or “regional exporter”: characterized by a strong centralization of activities in the country of origin, it will continue, over its evolution, to keep its decision-making power intact regardless of the business processes (BP) concerned; they will also always decide on the themes and strategies to be developed. However, depending on the expected value for money, some BPs may be relocated. Similarly, sales and marketing may be partially decentralized in order to have more targeted approaches.
• – Multinational: in such a company, R&D, financial management and strategy control remain centralized at the head office level. Often, the production of goods and services, sales and marketing will be decentralized to better adapt to local market conditions. However, to ensure proper functioning, a strong coordination and competition of the sites will be carried out on an ongoing basis.
• – Franchisor: mainly dedicated to a creative and engineering activity, it conceives, develops and finances a product or service in a given location. Once the concept has been defined, and for product-related reasons (limited lifespan: food, fashion, etc.), the franchisor relies heavily on personnel outside the company to manufacture and buys procured parts and stores them to sell sub-products or final products, and manages the distributed resource centers in return for the payment of fees or the use of licenses. In terms of organization, tools and resources are identically duplicated as many times as there are resource centers. Coordination, in terms of decision-making, remains quite difficult; here, we consider that we are faced with so-called “decentralized systems”.
• – Transnational: this kind of company is really made up of networked company networks. The very diverse shareholder base makes it difficult to link them to a nationality. There are geographically distributed companies that are a foreseeable development of many of the multinationals that exist today. Conceptually, they are agent companies that can easily communicate through computer networks. Value-added activities are managed from a global perspective, across borders, by optimizing the sources of supply and demand. Cost and profit centers are permanently relocated according to local competitive advantages, which vary over time and according to the legal, political and economic situation.

7.1.3. The company and the global context

When we talk about a company, it is obviously a general term that refers to an industrial company as well as a bank, an insurance company or a service industry. On another level, the developing political context and global economic culture, network and transport technologies, as well as the current possibilities of information systems that allow large volumes of data to be processed at a very low cost, are leading companies to develop global strategies with greater control and flexibility.

However, this globalization that is spoken about so much is not a new fact: it has always existed, since ancient times, passing through the Greeks and Romans. Marx and Engels were already talking about it in 1848. Yet, companies are now involved in possible economic crises between Western countries (such as the USA) and Eastern countries (such as China).

Things are of course changing, especially in terms of form: the players and the technologies are different and continuously evolve; practices have been modernized and benefit from these new changes and conditions. This notion of “global (agri-)culture”, the effects of which are growing every day, is very important insofar as expectations and tastes, consumer objects and tools, technical and trading standards (e.g. through the World Trade Organization (WTO)) lead to standardizing business, products and services, as well as to strengthening capital based on the notion of profit and towards the short term, with the main customer as the shareholder.

The impact on corporate networks is significant. Thus, any innovation, in order to succeed, must be able to reach as broad a customer base as possible in order to reduce the impact of increasingly high costs and investments. The new product, or service, will therefore be designed and developed with a global perspective. In IBM’s traditional terms, we are part of a global village where markets, production and operating activities, labor and economies of scale are global. However, for the reader familiar with Kondratieff’s cycles, the globalization we are talking about today has already changed:

• – first, the market economy as we know it has made it possible to increase trade by 20 or 50 times in recent decades, to create the European Union and the EFTA (the European Free Trade Association) and also the NAFTA (North-American, Free Trade Agreement), etc. Yet, there are limits to trade, and the neoliberal globalist illusion based on the notion of open production (distributed in the most favorable places) and trade is experiencing some setbacks. This is also what happens with the CETA agreements: globalization is not organized around consumers but around environments and influencing large companies; thus, the management of the major problems of our time (such as pollution) is a matter of selfish industrial economic interests, despite the needs of SMEs and the wishes of populations [MAS 18];
• – similarly, in terms of the possibilities of individual choice and cultural diversity, a dominant ideology is less and less supported by populations; the effects of protectionism develop more easily because strong and violent cultural particularities such as regionalism and nationalism are revealed at the same time. The resulting movement is all the more significant because the notions of ethics (which refers to good conscience and the public good) and morality (religious and social correctness) have overall not been sufficiently taken into account in the past. Everyone actually comes as a nationalist;
• – social and societal expectations are still characterized by differentiation (trademarks, working hours) and are supported by still significant laws. Thus, the need to adapt to local markets is linked to the fact that natural resources, as well as “efficient” means of production, are geographically distributed. Hence the need to relocate where economic, social and political needs require. Therefore, the current trend is to transform national companies into multinationals, and multinationals into transnationals.

However, despite these trying and contradictory effects, one form of international balance or another will prevail and we will always be confronted with models of “networked distributed systems”. This requires the implementation of physical and informational communications, interactions, feedback loops, etc. And this is how the natural evolution of companies tends in turn towards more complexity! If they are subject to the complexification process that we have already described, however, like any living organism, they are subject to significant structuring effects.

In the following, we will review some structures and organizations of systems or communities of agents; we will study their characteristics and then discuss the notion of a hierarchy of levels. We will see why and how to implement these concepts in our networked companies. We will also study, among other things, an organization called “The Fractal Factory” [WAR 93] that will enable us to apply the OKP (One-of-a-Kind Production) systems principles, as experienced within IBM EMEA production systems, both at French (Montpellier) and German (Sindelfingen) manufacturing plants. Here, the difficulty comes from the economic balance between the size and the cost of each batch. Today, according to the specific applications to be covered, we would call for technologies based on, for example, 3D printing and robotics.

7.2.1. Introduction

In any networked system, interaction is a fundamental element of the complexity that will result. Until now, the role and function of an agent has been defined, as well as its behavior. We have also talked about the types of relationships that agents could have with each other, as well as their communication protocols, but we have not yet addressed the problems of architecture, organization and structure of these relationships – what we are doing now.

It is generally agreed that a complex system is made up of autonomous agents, which commonly means decentralized and independent entities. But this is not always true: are complex systems decentralized and if so, to what extent? In terms of communications, is it the architecture that best lends itself to heterarchical interactions or does it respond to the n-cube system? These are all questions that we promise to address later on.

In Nature, to cope with complexity, the number of information and links that can be processed effectively is limited for a better control of the whole system. This problem has been solved biologically by the “multiplication of organizational levels” and the speciation of organs, as well as by a tree (and therefore hierarchical) structure that characterizes any system or network. Similarly, the corresponding control systems can be classified according to their structure. Various research studies have analyzed the evolution of the different existing structures, their advantages and disadvantages. New architectures have been proposed to improve the performance of existing industrial applications and meet the needs of future production systems. An approach that has been more widely used recently in every system since we know that most of organs or agents possess their own autonomy and by the fact that they are strongly interconnected together.

Some authors have presented the results of centralized and hierarchical controller architectures using dynamic and fully distributed or heterarchical scheduling with intelligent components. Others have proposed a classification based on four production management paradigms: centralized information (centralized decision support), distributed information (centralized decision support), centralized information (distributed decision support) and distributed information (distributed decision support).

Dilts provided an overview of the evolution of existing steering structures, from the centralized hierarchical structure to heterarchical control. He highlighted the characteristics, advantages and disadvantages of each structure [DIL 91]. He also stressed the influence and importance of a system’s architecture for the flexibility of its management and control.

Structures can be hierarchical, heterarchical, modular, holonic and agent-based. Three types of associated architecture can be distinguished: hierarchical, heterarchical and hybrid. In fact, in any case, a hybrid architecture based on the holonic concept seems to be a good solution to these different problems [KIM 02]. Finally, some French authors have provided an overview of the main possible architectures for the management of production systems and have distinguished the centralized, hierarchical, coordinated, distributed, decentralized and supervised distributed structures [PUJ 02].

In summary, a classification may be possible for steering structures. It involves organizations such as centralized or non-centralized, hierarchical or non-hierarchical, etc. First, steering structures can be classified into being centralized and non-centralized. Non-centralized structures include hierarchical, heterarchical and hybrid structures such as the n-cube. The hierarchical architecture splits into “hierarchical” and “modified hierarchical” structures. Heterarchical architecture can be decentralized or distributed. The hybrid architecture includes both hierarchical and heterarchical structures at the same time.

In the following, we will mention some work using these different architectures, while pointing out the advantages and disadvantages of each of them. This classification is also well-fitted to the recent economic situation generated by the technological evolution of very large companies such as GAFAM (Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft) or BATX (Baidu, Alibaba, Tencent, Xiaomi).

7.2.2. The centralized structure

The proposed centralized structure includes a control unit, or entity, that controls all production machines and has decision-making authority. It maintains the global information of all the entities’ activities in the system. This unit manages production, processes events in real time and synchronizes and coordinates all tasks (see Figure 7.1).

7.2.3. The non-centralized structure; the hierarchical structure

The natural presence of hierarchy in a company and the structures of complex systems have led researchers to design hierarchical architectures. This structure defines a master–slave relationship between the upper and lower levels of management. Each level coordinates the control units from the lower level to the lowest level (see Figure 7.2). Each level has relationships that depend on the higher level, and domination on the lower level. Decisions are made by the central control unit.

7.2.4. The heterarchical non-centralized structure

For this category of structure, it might be interesting to first note that the noun “heterarchy” and its adjective “heterarchical” are actually neologisms. The term heterarchical is formed from two Greek roots: heteros (other) and arckhein (to command), which originally meant “command by others”.

A heterarchy refers to the idea of different actors who assume in collegiality the coordination of a given collective action and are essentially opposed to the term hierarchy [TRE 02]. The heterarchical structure is also called the decentralized structure. In this structure, there is no higher-level control unit to coordinate all units (see Figure 7.3).

Since the control units are multiple and interacting, they can self-organize to ensure overall consistency in tasks. These units have the following four properties [CHO 93]:

• – equal right of access to resources;
• – access and mutual accessibility between them;
• – independent operating mode;
• – strict compliance with the rules and protocols of the global system.

From this architecture, an “egalitarian” system structure, called “peer-to-peer”, can be derived. Each element, or agent, participates in the decision-making process and enables orders to emerge. One difficulty concerns the management of restraints, deadlocks, as well as the expression of dominant choices.

7.2.5. The n-cube structure

In the field of network architectures, the structure described above corresponds to the so-called “peer-to-peer” connection mode. In such an organization, agents exchange and process information on the principle of equality: everyone is equal. However, this organization has two disadvantages:

• – coherence and coordination problems cannot be easily controlled. Indeed, as can be observed in Nature, any population needs guiding ideas (a common objective) so that each agent can organize its (field of) autonomy;
• – too many connections will reduce the performance of such systems. Indeed, in a complete graph where N is the number of vertices, the connectivity at the agent level, called K, is defined as K = N-1. Then, how will the system evolve? The theory of cellular automata [LIU 02] shows that the number of attractors is then large and that the same applies to the length of the paths traveled in the basin of attraction to converge towards the corresponding optimal point. Such cases are not interesting because the diversity of states is too great and the stability of the system insufficient.

Nevertheless, there is an interesting compromise, a theory that we will not describe here; it is the n-cube structure. If we refer again to the connectivity of any graph as K, the number of vertices (or agents) that can be considered is: N = 2^K. This type of network offers the greatest reliable access for a given neighborhood. Indeed, if we consider that the best compromise (in terms of number of attractors and cycle length) is obtained with low connectivity, we can then consider that it is the neighborhoods of Hopfield & Moore that are most suitable for self-organization phenomena.

This last organization is widely used in information systems in order to provide a well-balanced communication system that is able to ensure an efficient and sustainable architecture.