A Multi-Agent Simulation of Retail Management Practices

We apply Agent-Based Modeling and Simulation (ABMS) to investigate a set of problems in a retail context. Specifically, we are working to understand the relationship between human resource management practices and retail productivity. Despite the fact we are working within a relatively novel and complex domain, it is clear that intelligent agents do offer potential for developing organizational capabilities in the future. Our multi-disciplinary research team has worked with a UK department store to collect data and capture perceptions about operations from actors within departments. Based on this case study work, we have built a simulator that we present in this paper. We then use the simulator to gather empirical evidence regarding two specific management practices: empowerment and employee development

Requirements Modeling for Multi-Agent Systems

Different approaches for building modern software systems in complex and open environments have been proposed in the last few years. Some efforts try to take advantage of the agent-oriented paradigm to model/engineer complex information systems in terms of independent agents. These agents may collaborate in a computational organization (Multi-Agent Systems, MAS) by playing some specific roles having to interact with others in order to reach a global or individual goal. In addition, due to the complex nature of this type of systems, dealing with the classical functional and structural perspectives of software systems are not enough. The organizational perspective, that describes the context where these agents need to collaborate, and the social behavior perspective, that describes the different "intelligent" manners in which these agents can collaborate, need to be identified and properly specified. Several methodologies have been proposed to drive the development of MAS (e.g., Ingenias, Gaia, Tropos) although most of them mainly focus on the design and implementation phases and do not provide adequate mechanisms for capturing, defining, and specifying software requirements. Poor requirements engineering is recognized as the root of most errors in current software development projects, and as a means for improving the quality of current practices in the development of MAS, the main objective of this work is to propose a requirements modeling process to deal with software requirements covering the functional, structural, organizational, and social behavior perspectives of MAS. The requirements modeling proposed is developed within the model-driven engineering context defining the corresponding metamodel and its graphical syntax. In addition, a MAS requirements modeling process is specified using the Object Management Group's (OMG) Software Process Engineering Metamodel (SPEM). Finally, in order to illustrate the feasibility of our approach, we specified the software requirements of a strategic board game (the Diplomacy game).Rodríguez Viruel, ML. (2011). Requirements Modeling for Multi-Agent Systems. http://hdl.handle.net/10251/11416Archivo delegad

Organization of Multi-Agent Systems: An Overview

In complex, open, and heterogeneous environments, agents must be able to reorganize towards the most appropriate organizations to adapt unpredictable environment changes within Multi-Agent Systems (MAS). Types of reorganization can be seen from two different levels. The individual agents level (micro-level) in which an agent changes its behaviors and interactions with other agents to adapt its local environment. And the organizational level (macro-level) in which the whole system changes it structure by adding or removing agents. This chapter is dedicated to overview different aspects of what is called MAS Organization including its motivations, paradigms, models, and techniques adopted for statically or dynamically organizing agents in MAS.Comment: 12 page

Using Intelligent Agents to Understand Management Practices and Retail Productivity

Intelligent agents offer a new and exciting way of understanding the world of work. In this paper we apply agent-based modeling and simulation to investigate a set of problems in a retail context. Specifically, we are working to understand the relationship between human resource management practices and retail productivity. Despite the fact we are working within a relatively novel and complex domain, it is clear that intelligent agents could offer potential for fostering sustainable organizational capabilities in the future. The project is still at an early stage. So far we have conducted a case study in a UK department store to collect data and capture impressions about operations and actors within departments. Furthermore, based on our case study we have built and tested our first version of a retail branch simulator which we will present in this paper

Collaborative method to maintain business process models updated

Business process models are often forgotten after their creation and its representation is not usually updated. This appears to be negative as processes evolve over time. This paper discusses the issue of business process models maintenance through the definition of a collaborative method that creates interaction contexts enabling business actors to discuss about business processes, sharing business knowledge. The collaboration method extends the discussion about existing process representations to all stakeholders promoting their update. This collaborative method contributes to improve business process models, allowing updates based in change proposals and discussions, using a groupware tool that was developed. Four case studies were developed in real organizational environment. We came to the conclusion that the defined method and the developed tool can help organizations to maintain a business process model updated based on the inputs and consequent discussions taken by the organizational actors who participate in the processes.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Analyzing requirements of knowledge management systems with the support of agent organizations

Knowledge Management (KM) is considered by many organizations a key aspect in sustaining competitive advantage. Designing appropriate KM processes and enabling technology face considerable risks, as they must be shaped to respond to specific needs of the organizational environment. Thus, many systems are abandoned or fall into disuse because of inadequate understanding of the organizational context. This motivates current research, which tends to propose agent organizations as a useful paradigm for KM systems engineering. Following these approaches, organizations are analyzed as collective systems, composed of several agents, each of them autonomously producing and managing their own local data according to their own logic, needs, and interpretative schema, i.e. their goals and beliefs. These agents interact and coordinate for goal achievement defining a coherent local knowledge system. This paper presents a novel methodology for analyzing the requirements of a KM system based on an iterative workflow where a pivotal role is played by agent-oriented modeling. Within this approach, the needs for KM systems are traced back to the organization stakeholders’ goals. A case study is used to illustrate the methodology. The relationship of this work with current studies in agent organizations and organizational knowledge management is also discussed. Differently from other works, this methodology aims at offering a practical guideline to the analyst, pointing out the appropriate abstractions to be used in the different phases of the analysis

Applying the business process and practice alignment meta-model: Daily practices and process modelling

Background: Business Process Modelling (BPM) is one of the most important phases of information system design. Business Process (BP) meta-models allow capturing informational and behavioural aspects of business processes. Unfortunately, standard BP meta-modelling approaches focus just on process description, providing different BP models. It is not possible to compare and identify related daily practices in order to improve BP models. This lack of information implies that further research in BP meta-models is needed to reflect the evolution/change in BP. Considering this limitation, this paper introduces a new BP meta-model designed by Business Process and Practice Alignment Meta-model (BPPAMeta-model). Our intention is to present a meta-model that addresses features related to the alignment between daily work practices and BP descriptions. Objectives: This paper intends to present a meta-model which is going to integrate daily work information into coherent and sound process definitions. Methods/Approach: The methodology employed in the research follows a design-science approach. Results: The results of the case study are related to the application of the proposed meta-model to align the specification of a BP model with work practices models. Conclusions: This meta-model can be used within the BPPAM methodology to specify or improve business processes models based on work practice descriptions

Dynamics of organizational culture: Individual beliefs vs. social conformity

The complex nature of organizational culture challenges our ability to infers its underlying dynamics from observational studies. Recent computational studies have adopted a distinct different view, where plausible mechanisms are proposed to describe a wide range of social phenomena, including the onset and evolution of organizational culture. In this spirit, this work introduces an empirically-grounded, agent-based model which relaxes a set of assumptions that describes past work - (a) omittance of an individual's strive for achieving cognitive coherence, (b) limited integration of important contextual factors - by utilizing networks of beliefs and incorporating social rank into the dynamics. As a result, we illustrate that: (i) an organization may appear to be increasingly coherent in terms of organizational culture, yet be composed of individuals with reduced levels of coherence, (ii) the components of social conformity - peer-pressure and social rank - are influential at different aggregation levels.Comment: 20 pages, 8 figure