Realizing the Relation Between Intervention and Realization Systems

Abstract

The architecting process is made up of different activities that are supported by heuristic, norm-based, rules-based, and modeling methods to develop a functional model of the intervention system. The purpose of this thesis is to change the architecting paradigm by enabling a quantitative approach and testing the accuracy/validity of architecting heuristics. One of the heuristics is about incorporating organizational factors in the architecting process. Though a similar mindset has been used to design organizations under the mirroring hypothesis, a quantified link has never been attempted. Therefore a formalized link using the concepts of intervention and realization system has been adopted without committing to the form or nature of the link. Using a system-based approach of realization interconnected with the intervention system helps to generate true system requirements which is helpful in further resource estimation for the realization system as well as defining the real impact of changes in one system over another. The provision of this link provided an opportunity to simulate a digital model of these two systems together using a sample case study, making the feasibility of such interconnection explicit. This opens the way for others to use this approach to test the validity of other architecting heuristics too. The Goldsim software was used to design the simulation setup and test the hypothesis under different simulation conditions.