Modeling and simulation of business value chains: a dynamic approach to systems and decision support SimulValor.

Summary When making a decision, the decision-maker in a company is generally faced with the following situation: he or she has a set of alternatives, which are combinations of action variables, and is asked to achieve a certain number of objectives, which are characterized by a more or less large number of performance indicators. These objectives cover all of the company's relationships with the various parties that benefit from the results of its activities and with whom it interacts. The purpose of the performance indicators is to measure the company's success in meeting the expectations and needs of these parties: customers, shareholders, employees, the community. . And to its own expectations. The decision-maker needs to evaluate each of the alternatives according to each of the choice criteria selected and which represent the objectives to be achieved, and to evaluate each of these alternatives globally according to all the criteria. This work is placed in the context of high-level managerial decision support where the actions are potential projects for the development of the company's activities. The proposed approach, called SimulValor, uses system dynamics to model and simulate action alternatives and to evaluate their performances. In summary, the SimulValor approach aims at evaluating different action alternatives concerning the configuration of the company's activities by simulating the value flows that link the actions to the performances and the performances to the values generated to the beneficiaries. The main difficulty of the method is the extraction, harmonization and quantification of the qualitative data that characterize the influence links (and especially the utility functions) existing between the modeled elements.