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Transparency, consistency and modularity of strategic reasoning: an agent architecture for interactive business simulations

Published: 11 December 2011 Publication History

Abstract

Interactive business simulations are widely used to explore and compare business strategies from both practice and theory. In many business simulations however, educators and researchers lack support in observing how the simulated actors operationalize their strategies, in validating whether operations have been aligned with the strategy, and also in (re)configuring available player and opponent strategies based on new theoretical or practical insights. This paper specifies requirements for a novel business simulation architecture that facilitates transparency, consistency and modularity of strategic decision making by simulated actors in interactive business simulations. A system architecture is proposed that integrates three components: an extensible agent middleware, a distributed simulation engine and a modular reasoning framework. How the architecture fulfills the three requirements of strategic reasoning transparency, consistency and modularity is illustrated in a use case of a business simulation game for supply chain management education.

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  • (2021)Distributed Approaches to Supply Chain SimulationACM Transactions on Modeling and Computer Simulation10.1145/346617031:4(1-31)Online publication date: 16-Aug-2021

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cover image ACM Conferences
WSC '11: Proceedings of the Winter Simulation Conference
December 2011
4336 pages

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Winter Simulation Conference

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Published: 11 December 2011

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WSC'11
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WSC'11: Winter Simulation Conference 2011
December 11 - 14, 2011
Arizona, Phoenix

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WSC '11 Paper Acceptance Rate 203 of 270 submissions, 75%;
Overall Acceptance Rate 3,413 of 5,075 submissions, 67%

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  • (2021)Distributed Approaches to Supply Chain SimulationACM Transactions on Modeling and Computer Simulation10.1145/346617031:4(1-31)Online publication date: 16-Aug-2021

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