management practices, shopping behavior 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 multidisciplinary 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. 1.

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Agents offer a new and exciting way of understanding the world of work. In this paper we describe the development of agent-based simulation models, designed to help to understand the relationship between people management practices and retail performance. We report on the current development of our simulation models which includes new features concerning the evolution of customers over time. To test the features we have conducted a series of experiments dealing with customer pool sizes, standard and noise reduction modes, and the spread of customers ’ word of mouth. To validate and evaluate our model, we introduce new performance measure specific to retail operations. We show that by varying different parameters in our model we can simulate a range of customer experiences leading to significant differences in performance measures. Ultimately, we are interested in better understanding the impact of changes in staff behavior due to changes in store management practices. Our multi-disciplinary research team draws upon expertise from work psychologists and computer scientists. Despite the fact we are working within a relatively novel and complex domain, it is clear that intelligent agents offer potential for fostering sustainable organizational capabilities in the future.

ECF initiates and performs high-class research on climate change in close interaction with stakeholders. We provide a pluralistic communication platform in the emerging global field of researchers, governments, local authorities, businesses, and social movements. This field lies beyond the traditional linkage between academic institutions and the nation state hosting them. It requires a capability to learn from each other in situations where consensus is impossible, perhaps not even desirable. As a key requisite for addressing the climate challenge in this spirit, ECF contributes to a new economic theory that will enhance our capability to

This research investigated the simulation model behaviour of a traditional and combined discrete event as well as agent based simulation models when modelling human reactive and proactive behaviour in human centric complex systems. A departmental store was chosen as human centric complex case study where the operation system of a fitting room in WomensWear department was investigated. We have looked at ways to determine the efficiency of new management policies for the fitting room operation through simulating the reactive and proactive behaviour of staff towards customers. Once development of the simulation models and their verification had been done, we carried out a validation experiment in the form of a sensitivity analysis. Subsequently, we executed a statistical analysis where the mixed reactive and proactive behaviour experimental results were compared with some reactive experimental results from previously published works. Generally, this case study discovered that simple proactive individual behaviour could be modelled in both simulation models. In addition, we found the traditional discrete event model performed similar in the simulation model output compared to the combined discrete event and agent based simulation when modelling similar human behaviour.

Abstract. We describe a distributed architecture for situated largescale agent-based simulations with predominately local interactions. The approach, implemented in AglobeX Simulation platform, is based on a spatially partitioned simulated virtual environment and allocating a dedicated processing core to the environment simulation within each partition. In combination with dynamic load-balancing, such partitioning enables virtually unlimited scalability of the simulation platform. The approach has been used to extend the AgentFly air-traffic testbed to support simulation of a complete civilian air-traffic touching National Air-Space of United States. Thorough evaluation of the system has been performed, confirming that it can scale up to a very high number of complex agents operating simultaneously (thousands of aircraft) and determining the impact of different configurations of the simulation architecture on its overall performance. 1

Serious Game/Simulation of a dynamic society in a ‘failed state ’ situation

Governments of many countries attempt to increase public participation by exploiting the capabilities and high penetration of the Internet. In this direction they make considerable investments for constructing and operating e-participation websites; however, the use of them has been in general limited and below expectations. For this reason governments, in order to widen e-participation, should investigate the exploitation of the numerous users-driven Web 2.0 social media as well, which seem to be quite successful in attracting huge numbers of users. This paper describes a methodology for the exploitation of the Web 2.0 social media by government organizations in the processes of public policies formulation, through a central platform-toolset providing interoperability with many different social media, and enabling posting and retrieving content from them in a systematic centrally managed and machinesupported automated manner (through their application programming interfaces (APIs)). The proposed methodology includes the use of ‘Policy Gadgets ’ (Padgets), which are defined as micro web applications presenting policy messages in various popular Web 2.0 social media

Complex adaptive systems (CAS) are composed of interacting agents, exhibit nonlinear properties such as positive and negative feedback, and tend to produce emergent behavior that cannot be wholly explained by deconstructing the system into its constituent parts. Both system dynamics (equation-based) approaches and agent-based approaches have been used to model such systems, and each has its benefits and drawbacks. In this paper, we introduce a class of agent-based models with an embedded system dynamics model, and detail the semantics of a simulation framework for these models. This model definition, along with the simulation framework, combines agent-based and system dynamics approaches in a way that retains the strengths of both paradigms. We show the applicability of our model by instantiating it for two example complex adaptive systems in the field of Computational Sustainability, drawn from ecology and epidemiology. We then present a more detailed application in epidemiology, in which we compare a previously unstudied intervention strategy to established ones. Our experimental results, unattainable using previous methods, yield insight into the effectiveness of these intervention strategies.