Planning for technology implementation: an SD(DEA) approach

The introduction of new technologies often causes a temporary loss of productivity and leads to additional unforeseen costs over a system's life-cycle. One of the reasons for this productivity degradation is that traditional systems engineering management fails to plan for the effects of technology implementation. However, planning for technology implementation is not an easy venture. When introducing new technology, the engineer and/or manager must decide the optimum system composition, often from a large number of system configuration options, and an equally large number of operational process scenarios. This paper discusses the eight tasks involved with simulating and optimizing the dynamic behavior of a system. This approach combines system dynamics (SD) theory with data envelopment analysis (DEA) into a framework called system dynamics with data envelopment analysis incorporated SD(DEA). By employing this approach, the authors believe that the attributes of both the dynamic complexity (i.e. SD) and combinatorial complexity (i.e. linear programming, DEA) theories can be realized within the same framework.