Paccar Hall, Room 295 Seminar Speaker: Itai Gurvich Affiliation: Cornell University Area: Operations Management Name of Presentation: Collaboration and multi-tasking in networks Abstract: Motivated by the trend towards more collaboration in workflows, we study networks where some tasks require the simultaneous processing by multiple types of multitasking human or indivisible resources. In this presentation, I will discuss two fundamental operations questions in the context of such collaborative networks: (1) What is the capacity of the network and (2) How much freedom is there to prioritize certain tasks over others – this secoond question pertains to the tradeoff between capacity and ``controllability’’. The answer to the first question is that capacity in collaborative networks is generally smaller than the bottleneck capacity. Both capacities are equal in networks with a nested collaboration architecture, which induces a collaboration level for each task depending on how many types of resources it requires. To address the second question, we study how task prioritization impacts the achievable capacity of such hierarchical networks using a conceptual queueing framework that formalizes coordination and switching idleness. |