FEATURED PAPER

Nonlinear and Random Accomplishment Time of Human Actions

By Pavel Barseghyan, PhD

Abstract

Human activities can be represented as a set of parallel and sequential human actions. In other words, separate actions of humans are the elements of their activities.

Each human action can be characterized by its difficulty and duration. Analyzing the usual sequence of everyday human actions can be seen that they have a random nature and can be described by probabilistic methods.

Besides, quantitative analysis of individual human actions indicates that the relationships between action duration and action difficulty parameters have nonlinear nature.

Another important property of human actions is that part of their parameters can be measured relatively easy. For this reason, quantitative study of individual human actions is crucial for the establishment of the basic mathematical theory of human labor.

Having the quantitative picture of the individual human actions, through their parallel and serial combinations one can create a general quantitative picture of the whole human labor.

Such an approach provides a rich opportunity for applying the methodology of systems analysis in the field of human labor. Under this approach, human activities are considered as a system whose elements are the individual actions of people.

In addition, any delay in the work of people and the associated risks are closely linked with the quantitative characteristics of individual human actions. In this sense, it is important to derive in an analytical way and justify the distribution functions of the duration of human activities on the basis of the fundamental mathematical description of the individual human actions.

This approach to determining the schedule risk of people's work shows that the choice of a particular type of risk function cannot be arbitrary, as it takes place currently, because it is closely linked with the essence of the specific problems under study.

This work is devoted to the study of quantitative models of human actions in order to reflect their nonlinear and stochastic nature.

The work consists of several parts. In the first part with the help of a statistical experiment are derived probabilistic characteristics of the duration of human actions. The differential equation to describe the dynamics of the completion of human actions is derived. The notion of intensity of the completion of individual human actions is introduced. Different distribution functions of human action duration are discussed. Depending on the circumstances, these distribution functions can have either finite or infinite variance, thus explaining the emergence and mechanisms of fat tail distributions.

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About the Author Pavel Barseghyan, PhD Author Dr. Pavel Barseghyan is a consultant in the field of quantitative project management, project data mining and organizational science. He is the founder of Systemic PM, LLC, a project management company. Has over 40 years experience in academia, the electronics industry, the EDA industry and Project Management Research and tools development. During the period of 1999-2010 he was the Vice President of Research for Numetrics Management Systems. Prior to joining Numetrics, Dr. Barseghyan worked as an R&D manager at Infinite Technology Corp. in Texas. He was also a founder and the president of an EDA start-up company, DAN Technologies, Ltd. that focused on high-level chip design planning and RTL structural floor planning technologies. Before joining ITC, Dr. Barseghyan was head of the Electronic Design and CAD department at the State Engineering University of Armenia, focusing on development of the Theory of Massively Interconnected Systems and its applications to electronic design. During the period of 1975-1990, he was also a member of the University Educational Policy Commission for Electronic Design and CAD Direction in the Higher Education Ministry of the former USSR. Earlier in his career he was a senior researcher in Yerevan Research and Development Institute of Mathematical Machines (Armenia). He is an author of nine monographs and textbooks and more than 100 scientific articles in the area of quantitative project management, mathematical theory of human work, electronic design and EDA methodologies, and tools development. More than 10 Ph.D. degrees have been awarded under his supervision. Dr. Barseghyan holds an MS in Electrical Engineering (1967) and Ph.D. (1972) and Doctor of Technical Sciences (1990) in Computer Engineering from Yerevan Polytechnic Institute (Armenia). Pavel can be contacted at pavel@systemicpm.com.