A General Model of Mobile Environments: Simulation Support for Strategic Management Decisions

Since the ability of workforce management systems to handle mobility induced challenges of mobile environments like data-communication cut-offs, reduced network bandwidth, and security concerns improved recently, the optimization efforts of mobile enterprises increasingly focus on the organizational setup of their mobile environment. This includes issues like, e.g., the dimension and staffing of regional subdivisions, qualification balance of the workforce, and resource allocation strategies. While this multitude of possible adjustment parameters for optimization prevents from the analytical prediction of organizational change efforts, simulation is a promising approach to analyze mobile environments and their change. In this work we present a formal model representing a generalization of mobile environments. This model can be utilized to examine the cost situation and performance of both real mobile enterprises and projected future development scenarios of such enterprises. The model is developed using colored petri nets (CPN) and the software suite CPN Tools. We show that our model is capable of predicting the outcomes of organizational change projects by the utilization of simulation and present a validation of our model based on real-world data of a German gas and power supply.