Exploring Decentralized System Architectures and Their Influence on Performance and Robustness
Open AccessDecentralization has found a growing role in socio-technical systems from across many domains, and a significant body of research explores how decentralization influences a number of desirable and undesirable outcomes in these systems. While decentralization is generally characterized by the distribution of a system's features away from the center or otherwise across its architecture, systems often differ in which features are distributed and how. Chapter 2 explores how decentralization manifests in six real urban transit and military command and control (C2) systems. We learn that decentralization spans four broad aspects of these systems -- decision-making, functionality, external interfaces, and internal interfaces. Furthermore, a number of archetypes which aid in distinguishing amongst systems are identified and discussed. Next, while decentralization has been tied to a number of ``-ilities" - non-functional life-cycle characteristics of systems - its relationship with performance robustness is not frequently explored. In Chapter 3, we model a hierarchical military C2 system in order to explore how decentralized decision-making influences the system's performance and robustness characteristics. We find that while completely centralized or decentralized archetypes may achieve desirable performance under certain strict conditions, centralizing only system-consequential functions and decentralizing repetitive, ``local" decisions improves general performance robustness above fully centralized or decentralized alternatives. Finally, the literature often explores decentralization in conjunction with characteristics of a system's environment. In Chapter 4, we explore the impacts of four of these characteristics - functional interdependence, resource interdependence, and both internal and external interaction costs - on the performance of several decentralized C2 system archetypes. Decentralization, we learn, can be useful for overcoming some challenging features of the environment such as high external interaction cost, but may remain largely susceptible to others which can limit its use. This dissertation contributes to a growing body of research surrounding decentralization, its role in the architecture of complex systems, and how it influences the outcomes of systems.
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