Agile Virtual Organization Design For Crowdsourcing Tasks

The Revolution of Internet provides chances for creative ideas and actions, and thus a new labor organization which is called crowdsourcing steps into its stage. Relied on the effective cooperation of networked virtual organization members, crowdsourcing promotes the combination of entity organization and virtual organization. However, relevant researches on virtual organization are still being explored, and especially we are not familiare with the operating mechanism, modeling and design methods of virtual organizations, therefore, the advanced concepts of virtual organizations have not yet been fully realized in present applications and researches. For this reason, this thesis proposes an agile virtural organization design scheme in terms of knowledge-intensive crowdsourcing tasks, aiming at providing more sound future applications of virtual organization and enhancing its reliability and efficiency for addressing such tasks.This thesis focuses on four aspects, including modeling of agile virtual organizations, selection of organization members, organizational structure analysis and organizational agility analysis.(1) Propose a Meta-Networked Model of Virtual OrganizationAnalyze the characters of crowdsourcing and virtual organization respectively, and discuss relevant modeling methods to design virtual organization. Then, with the combination of the meta matrix model and multi-agents model, we propose a meta-networked model of virtual organization, and generalize the four elements and fours rules of this model afterwards, i.e. individual, knowledge, crowdsourcing task and organization, task receiving rule, task processing rule, individual interacting rule and individual evolving rule. Furthermore, we discuss how those organization elements change and present our results.(2) Propose the Selection Strategies of Organization Members on the basis of node similarity and path similarityIn order to select a suitable emergent leader of the dynamic virtual organization on the basis of various crowdsouring tasks, we propose the Overall-Node-Similarity indicator, and apply this indicator to definate the emergent leaders. Furthermore, we propose a new node similarity based indicator, called IT indicator, to predict the similaries between different nodes, and compare its effectivess and accuray with other traditional similar indicators, such as AA, RA etc. Results show that our IT indicator is no worse than the RA indicator. Followingly, we propose another two revised indicators on the basis of LocalPathe indicator and Katz indicator respectively, as well as a new similar path based indicator and its revision strategy. According to the indicator proposed above, we present the leader selection and cooperators selection startegies at the end of this section.(3) Propose two methods to Analyze Agile Virtual Organization StructureBased on the selected leader and cooperators, we propose two methods to analyze agile virtual organization structure. Firstly, we propose the Task-Perception –Convergence-Degree to evaluate the effectiveness of our designed organization, and apply this rule to evaluate 7 different networks, such as Random network, BA network, and Edge network etc. According to the evaluation results, we propose two structure analysis strategies on the basis of Edge network and Star network separatedly. One of thess two strategies is named as Random-Devision-Strategy, and the other is called Optimal-Edge-Adding-Probability-Searching-Strategy. Afterwards, we apply those strategies to design a given group composed of a learder and 120 cooperators. Results show the latter strategy is better to design agile virtual organization structure. Furthermore, when the edge-adding probability gets 0.0252, the effectiveness of such organization is best.(4) Discuss the Agility of such Designed OrganizationFinally, we discuss the agility of such designed organization. When the designed organiztion processes crowdsourcing tasks, other new members may join in this organization randomly and old members may quite this organization, hence the organization is dynamic during its life circle. Experiments show that with the unpredictable change of organization members, the effectiveness and efficiency of our designed organization fluctuates to some accetable extent to meet the agility requirements.