Information Systems in Management Science—The Use of Mathematics for Management Information Systems. II

In the first part of this article [Vazsonyi, Andrew. 1976. The use of mathematics for management information systems. Interfaces6 (2, February).] I indicated that classical mathematics cannot deal with management information systems and on the basis of five assertions proposed the hypothesis: The mathematical theory of MIS deals with sets in a function space of stochastic processes satisfying specified systems of structured mappings.

Now I introduce the type of mathematics which I think is capable of modeling MIS. I am referring to the theory of automata initiated by the classical paper of Alan M. Turing [Turing, A. M. 1936. On computable numbers with an application to the Entscheidungs-problem. Proc. London Math. Soc., Ser. 242 230–265.]. Today, if you look into mathematical literature [Paz, Azaria. 1971. Introduction to Probabilistic Automata. Academic Press, New York and London.] you find that Turing's original theory has been greatly expanded, and key concepts like (1) automata, (2) machines, (3) sequential, (4) deterministic, (5) probabilistic, (6) stochastic, are frequently used. My preliminary thesis is: The agents, men and machines, of an organization are to be modeled by a network of stochastic automata.