Using agent based simulation to empirically examine complexity in carbon footprint business process

Through the critical analysis of the extant literature, it is observed that Simulation is widely used as a research method in Natural Sciences, Engineering and Social Sciences, in addition to argumentation and formalisation as the third way of carrying out research. Simulation is not so widely used in Business and Management research as it ought to have been, though this is changing for the better with the technological advances in computers and their computational power. These technological advances enhance the capability of theoretical research models, in defining a problem and their use in empirically examining a solution to the problem in simulated reality, like never before. Management journal searches for “Simulation and Complexity Theory” returned nil or zero returns, which explain that this combination is not popular in management research, though they are used individually more often. The major objective of this paper is to analyse some of the conceptual (or theoretical) and methodological (or empirical) contributions that Agent Based Simulation and Complexity Theory can make to the business and management community in their business process related research In view of this, some basic ideas are discussed of using Agent Based Simulation as a method in Business and Management Studies research and how an Agent Based Model can be applied to a business process as complex as Carbon Footprint. It is in this context that the use of Complexity as the base theory to empirically examine a business process is discussed. Throughout this article, our research on complex adaptive systems (e.g., Accounting Information System) in continuously changing organisations managing complex business processes (e.g., Carbon Footprint business process) is considered as the basis for illustrating some of the concepts. Through this article, avenues for further management research using these tools and methodology are suggested

Reforming state enterprises in socialist economies : guidelines for leasing them to entrepreneurs

Since the state has proven to be incompetent in its management of state owned enterprises a new structure must be found that takes into account the incompetence of the state but ensures that the state's economic interests are preserved the best way possible. Two of the most difficult tasks in this process are how to exercise ownership rights to assets and simultaneously delegate decision making to the management of the firm. This paper finds that the solution of these problems is to lease state owned enterprises to entrepreneurs through contracts derived from the principal-agent literature where the state is the principal and the agent is the lessee. Since the state needs to delegate responsibility to the management of state owned enterprises, the process of reform becomes in reality a principal-agent problem. To facilitate the reform process it is necessary to establish a credit market because the lessee may have investment plans that need to be financed. So far no country has yet tried to implement lease schemes based on principal-agent contracts. Future work needs to build a bridge between theory and reality to see whether they both can benefit from the interaction.Health Economics&Finance,International Terrorism&Counterterrorism,Economic Theory&Research,Banks&Banking Reform,Environmental Economics&Policies

Designing community care systems with AUML

This paper describes an approach to developing an appropriate agent environment appropriate for use in community care applications. Key to its success is that software designers collaborate with environment builders to provide the levels of cooperation and support required within an integrated agent–oriented community system. Agent-oriented Unified Modeling Language (AUML) is a practical approach to the analysis, design, implementation and management of such an agent-based system, whilst providing the power and expressiveness necessary to support the specification, design and organization of a health care service. The background of an agent-based community care application to support the elderly is described. Our approach to building agent–oriented software development solutions emphasizes the importance of AUML as a fundamental initial step in producing more general agent–based architectures. This approach aims to present an effective methodology for an agent software development process using a service oriented approach, by addressing the agent decomposition, abstraction, and organization characteristics, whilst reducing its complexity by exploiting AUML’s productivity potential. </p

The SGIA and the Common Growing Language

Human or virtual agents are presented in our lives daily. They serve our purposes and represent us in different many situations. Nowadays the number of virtual agents is increasing daily because they are cheaper, faster and more accurate than human agents. Our aim in this article is to define a new type of intelligent agent called SGIA – Self Growing Intelligent Agent and a new defining language for it. The SGIA agent is an intelligent agent with all the common agents’ characteristics and with other special one: that to learn and grow by itself in knowledge and size.Software Agent, Knowledge Management, Education Process, Language Development

Model Driven Evolution of an Agent-Based Home Energy Management System

Advanced smart home appliances and new models of energy tariffs imposed by energy providers pose new challenges in the automation of home energy management. Users need some assistant tool that helps them to make complex decisions with different goals, depending on the current situation. Multi-agent systems have proved to be a suitable technology to develop self-management systems, able to take the most adequate decision under different context-dependent situations, like the home energy management. The heterogeneity of home appliances and also the changes in the energy policies of providers introduce the necessity of explicitly modeling this variability. But, multi-agent systems lack of mechanisms to effectively deal with the different degrees of variability required by these kinds of systems. Software Product Line technologies, including variability models, has been successfully applied to different domains to explicitly model any kind of variability. We have defined a software product line development process that performs a model driven generation of agents embedded in heterogeneous smart objects with different degrees of self-management. However, once deployed, the home energy assistant system has to be able to evolve to self-adapt its decision making or devices to new requirements. So, in this paper we propose a model driven mechanism to automatically manage the evolution of multi-agent systems distributed among several devices.Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tech

Implementing a Business Process Management System Using ADEPT: A Real-World Case Study

This article describes how the agent-based design of ADEPT (advanced decision environment for processed tasks) and implementation philosophy was used to prototype a business process management system for a real-world application. The application illustrated is based on the British Telecom (BT) business process of providing a quote to a customer for installing a network to deliver a specified type of telecommunication service. Particular emphasis is placed upon the techniques developed for specifying services, allowing heterogeneous information models to interoperate, allowing rich and flexible interagent negotiation to occur, and on the issues related to interfacing agent-based systems and humans. This article builds upon the companion article (Applied Artificial Intelligence Vol.14, no 2, pgs. 145-189) that provides details of the rationale and design of the ADEPT technology deployed in this application