| Transformations to socio-technical systems may be enacted at fairly low levels, i.e., through changes in technology, processes, information and workers, to obtain a change in system level performance. This thesis provides a conceptual framework and a simulation platform to a priori computationally analyze the impact of such transformations.; This thesis builds on the principles of cognitive engineering to describe the components of the work environment, i.e., technology, processes and information, in work relevant ways and using a structure-preserving model, i.e., a model form that describes the models using the same attributes and structure as used by system designers. This thesis also builds on the principles of agent-based modeling to model workers and their interactions with the work environment. These models are specified through a conceptual framework that includes declarative models describing which components are included within the system and their interrelations, and object-oriented models of those complex, dynamic behaviors that cannot be adequately described declaratively.; Declarative modeling enables easy composition and modification of component models and, by declaring all required components collectively, a system model. This thesis established an XML representation for the declarative models, and developed a mechanism that automatically assembles, from the individual components' specifications and interrelations, a network-level model of the entire system in XML, which can serve to analyze network dependencies between components. The combination of the declarative and object-oriented models also enables computational simulations to predict the system performance that will emerge from a network of components when placed in a given scenario. Thus, this thesis also developed an agent-based simulation platform to support analysis of emergent behavior.; The theoretical contributions of this thesis include the conceptual framework as a broadly applicable and structure-preserving representation of the important aspects of socio-technical system behavior, and associated extensions to cognitive engineering descriptions of the work environment. These insights, combined with the simulation platform, also enable computational modeling, analysis and prediction of socio-technical system performance with a comprehensiveness and detail not possible before. The theoretical and practical utility of these developments is demonstrated through a case study in air traffic control. |
