  In various fields from quantum physics to biology, the open quantum dynamics
of a system consisting of interacting subsystems emphasizes its fundamental
functionality. The local approach, deriving a dissipator in a master equation
by ignoring the inter-subsystem interaction, has been widely used to describe
the reduced dynamics due to its robustness to keep the positivity of a density
operator. However, one critique is that a stationary state obtained by the
approach in the limit of weak system-environment coupling is written in the
form of the Gibbs state for the partial Hamiltonian by excluding the
inter-subsystem interaction from the total one of the relevant system. As an
alternative, the global approach, deriving a dissipator with including the
inter-subsystem interaction, under the Born--Markov and secular approximations
has attracted much attention, and there is debate concerning its violation of
positivity in the short-term region and/or limited parameter region for the
Bohr frequencies of the subsystems. In this study, we present a formalism that
leads to the time-convolutionless (time-local) master equation obtained by
extending the global approach beyond the Born-Markov and secular
approximations. We apply it to the excitation energy transfer between
interacting sites in which only the terminal site weakly interacts with a
bosonic environment of finite temperature in a manner beyond the rotating-wave
approximation. We find that the formulation (1) gives the short-time behavior
while preserving positivity, (2) shows the oscillatory features that the
secular approximation would obscure, and (3) leads to a stationary state very
near to the Gibbs state for the total Hamiltonian of the relevant system.
