Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Variation In Human-Intensive Systems: A Conceptual Framework For Characterizing, Modeling, And Analyzing Families Of Systems, Borislava I. Simidchieva

Doctoral Dissertations

A system model---namely a formal definition of the coordination of people, hardware devices, and software components performing activities, using resources and artifacts, and producing various outputs---can aid understanding of the real-world system it models. Complex real-world systems, however, exhibit considerable amounts of variation that can be difficult or impossible to represent within a single model. This dissertation evaluates the hypothesis that the careful characterization and representation of system variation can aid in the generation and analysis of concrete system instances related to one another in specified ways and manifesting different kinds of variation. When a set of closely related systems …