Abstract:

The management structure of big multi-national organizations has become extremely complex, and traditional organization structure models are finding it hard to keep up with the demands imposed by such huge and dynamic entities. The object-oriented (organic) structure has been proposed as a solution for the organization structure because of its various benefits. However, the organic structure is by nature a static model that does not allow for predicting dynamic operation problems before they occur. The goal of this paper is therefore to design a generic model, using a Petri net-based framework, to simulate the workflow of virtual organizations that follow the organic structure in essential tasks like scheduling, monitoring and supervising. The proposed model has the ability to predict problems before they occur and is thus quite an effective tool for resource utilization, business planning and monitoring. A Petri net can predict problems like deadlock, priority inversion and starvation and is an invaluable tool for organization management.