The DiDIY Factory Model extends the Model of Making to an application in work and organisation. It models an abstract factory with supervisors, workers, machines and incoming jobs, requesting (sequences of) tasks to be performed. The purpose of this model is to investigate the impact Digital Do-It-Yourself (DiDIY) could have on the domain of work and organisation.
Two variants of organisation can be compared:
- With supervisor. In this variant, the supervisor is in charge of deciding who is producing what. Workers are assigned incoming jobs, and then assemble the specified target by using the necessary resources and machines in the correct order. Whenever a job is finished, the worker asks the supervisor what to do next.
- Without supervisor. In this DiDIY variant of the factory model workers decide themselves what to do next. They have access to all the necessary information: currently available machines, waiting jobs, outstanding targets, and which operations produce what from which inputs. Jobs in this variant are split into their component tasks, with workers putting intermediate products onto one patch for everyone to use. This achieves a simple form of cooperation, where several workers may contribute to the production of one target.
The model and its documentation are freely available from the CoMSES Computational Model Library (formely openabm.org):
You can also have a look at a paper based on an earlier version of the model and some slides describing the model and some preliminary results.