The socio-technical system (STS) plays a critical role in human society and is an important topic in Systems Engineering and Design Science. Its performance is not only affected by social aspects but also influenced by various technical factors. To understand the relationships and interactions among different components and subsystems in STS, many studies have been done either from at individual agent level or at the system or global level, yet few studies were conducted at the local structural level in such systems. Motivated by this research gap, we propose an approach to analyzing STS based on the network motif theory. Compared with previous studies, our approach is able to provide an in-depth understanding of the relations between local system structures and global-level performance of an STS, therefore better inform systems engineering and design. The proposed approach is applied in the bike-sharing systems (BSS) to validate its feasibility and applicability. In this paper, we focus on studying the size-3 motif, the most basic building block of complex networks, and its correlations to a BSS' rebalancing performance in three different cities, i.e., NYC, Chicago, and Los Angeles. This paper reaches three conclusions. First, both seasonal and city effect plays a significant role in affecting BSS' network structure and its local motif characteristics. Second, the rebalancing issue, i.e., the imbalance between bike returns and rentals, at local transit level is different from that observed at the system level. Third, the average geographical distance of size-3 trip motifs follows strong patters correlated to the motif structures as well as the number of directed links in a motif. These insights can guide system designers and/or other stakeholders in engineering complex STS from a bottom-up manner in order to achieve desired system-level performance. This study contributes to both the design theory of complex systems and the BSS research community by providing a new perspective based on network motifs.


Towards Engineering Complex Socio-Technical Systems Using Network Motifs:\x0bA Case Study on Bike-Sharing Systems

Division / Sponsors: 
Design Engineering Division and Computers & Information In Engineering Division


Paper Proceedings: https://asmedigitalcollection.asme.org/IDETC-CIE/IDETC-CIE2020/volume/83907

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