Abstract for:The OR Control Tower: A Simulation-Based Concept for Resilience and Sustainable Optimization of Complex Adaptive Systems

We depend to a great extent upon the services delivered by complex adaptive systems (CAS). Despite its resilience and ability to recover from major disruptions, a CAS sometimes recovers far too slow. The result is often at least an economic harm. To overcome this limitation, we introduce the concept of an OR Control Tower. Our idea is to extend a CAS with a dedicated element that has a full overview of the system. In contrast to control tower concepts that start to evolve in among others supply chain management, the OR Control Tower has the ability to optimize a given CAS without human intervention. One core element of the OR Control Tower is the prediction component that simulates different configurations of a CAS. It makes use of either a strategy-based or an agent-based SD model to simulate the probable future evolution of the CAS. An optimization algorithm uses the prediction capability to identify a sustainable solution that can be implemented in the CAS. We illustrate the basic principle of the OR Control Tower concept by an example from the field of strategic workforce planning and embed into an SD framework.