Aggregation and Information Structuring in Large-Scale Dynamic Systems

The problem of information structuring in large-scale dynamic systems is considered. The structuring effort is defined as the aggregation of the state vector in a prespecified manner. It is shown that, when the goal of the decisionmaking process (i.e., what are we trying to achieve) is considered in this aggregation step, simplified decision rules are obtained. This structured information is directly related to the goal of the decisionmaking process, and therefore, different goals will require different information structures even though the basic available data are the same; i.e., the same data have to be aggregated in a different way for every decision problem.