An agent based modeling and simulation methodology for strategic inter-organizational networks

Strategic inter-organizational networks reflect a fruitful but fragile kind of both cooperation and competition between their independent and voluntarily participating members that can be organizations, parts of enterprises, or individual persons. The motivation to participate is to offer capabilities to others and at the same time to integrate others' capabilities in order to better or even at all fulfill own tasks or to reach own goals. Cooperation in these networks is led by trustful interactions and is based on risky pre-investments that lead to mutual dependencies and reciprocal expectations. This thesis addresses the modeling and support of strategic inter-organizational networks, which includes the support of utility- but at the same time trust-based cooperations, the management of expectations, and the interplay between individuals' actions and network structures (known as micro-meso or micro-macro phenomena). With an agent-oriented logic-based approach called SNet, we model agent-internal rationales, the interplay between agents, and static and dynamic aspects within strategic inter-organizational networks and allow for static analysis and dynamic simulations. SNet partially extends and combines existing languages: (1) the agent-oriented modeling language i* for modeling agent internal goals, capabilities, resources, plans, etc. and inter agent dependencies; (2) the high-level logic-based planning language ConGolog with its underlying formalism, the situation calculus, which allows us to formulate agent controllers that pursue goal-oriented tasks while concurrently monitoring and reacting to conditions in the environment; and (3) the deductive object-base ConceptBase with its underlying representation language Telos and its query language CBQL. The agents that can be modeled in SNet are not purely reactive, but they are also deliberative, i.e. they communicate, augment their capabilities by delegation, schedule tasks, and they plan and act utility- and trust-based.

Grantor dc:publisher

Publikationsserver der RWTH Aachen University

Year dc:date

2008

Author dc:creator

• Gans, Günter

Contributors dc:contributor

• Lakemeyer, Gerhard

• info:eu-repo/classification/ddc/004
• Modellierung
• Simulation
• Mehragentensystem
• Soziales Netzwerk
• Netzwerkanalyse <Soziologie>
• Informatik
• planning language
• i
• Golog
• ConceptBase
• SNet

Statement dc:rights

• info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess

Language dc:language

eng

Identifier

https://publications.rwth-aachen.de/search?p=id:%22RWTH-CONV-113127%22

OAI record oai:identifier

https://publications.rwth-aachen.de/oai2d?verb=GetRecord&metadataPrefix=oai_dc&identifier=oai%3Apublications.rwth-aachen.de%3A50587