Research project Enterprise Architecture, Simulation, and Digital Twins for Organizational Decision Support

Organizations undergoing digital transformation must make decisions whose consequences extend across processes, people, capabilities, and information systems. Yet these interdependencies are difficult to analyse before changes are implemented. A manager asking:, “If we automate part of this process, how does that affect team capacity and cycle time?” has few reliable ways to find an answer.

This PhD project investigates how such practitioner questions can be translated into executable organizational models for simulation-based decision support. Enterprise architecture provides a structured representation of the organization, simulation allows proposed changes to be explored in advance, and digital twin principles help keep these models aligned with the organization as it evolves.

Three questions guide the research:

• How can practitioner decision questions be translated into formal organizational scenarios?
• How can relevant enterprise architecture elements and dependencies be transformed into executable simulation models?
• How can the path from question to simulation-based insight remain traceable while models stay aligned with changing organizations?

The project aims to develop frameworks, methods, and prototype tools connecting practitioner questions, enterprise architecture, simulation, and digital twins to support better-informed decisions about organizational change.

This is Adelen Festin’s PhD project, supervised by Simon Hacks (main supervisor) and Georgios Koutsopoulos (co-supervisor).