Exploring Alternative Designs of Socio-Technical Systems

Sociotechnial systems (STSs) consist of a complex interplay of technical components, humans, and organizations. As other types of systems, STSs need to evolve in response to changing requirements and operational environments. Evolving STSs is a complex activity, which requires reconfiguration of technical components as well as rerouting of interactions among human and social actors. Moreover, reconfiguration has to respect participant autonomy, while coping with conflicting goals and noncooperation in identifying a configuration that minimizes changes relative to the current configuration. In this paper, we present a framework that supports design and evolution of STSs. The framework includes (i) the DEST language for modeling STSs as goal-oriented actors that interact via social commitments; (ii) techniques for building a network of interactions that fulfills participant requirements; and (iii) techniques for evolving an existing STS while minimizing change. We encode the design and evolution of STSs as an automated planning problem.