Abstract
The purpose of this book is to use agent-based simulations for studying business processes of any problem domain with the purpose to optimize them. When one is faced with a new problem domain and intends to model and simulate business processes of that domain, a natural question to be asked is “How should I start?” We answer this question in this chapter. The answer consists of three stages. First, the purpose and decisions to be supported by business process simulation and the stakeholders are identified. This entails identifying agents or active entities of the problem domain and representing their behaviors, knowledge, and interactions. Second, the models representing the problem domain analysis are mapped to the business process models. Third, the problem domain analysis models and business process models are mapped to the NetLogo program. To understand the problem domain and decisions to be supported, our approach uses a hierarchical abstraction to help deal with complexity in business processes. We take a typical top-down approach of focusing on high-level details early in problem domain analysis and exploring the lower-level details once the high-level understanding is sufficient. The purpose of this chapter is to describe how this can be done in a holistic and balanced manner. The methodology put forward in this chapter can also be used for agent-oriented problem domain analysis for different purposes separately from business process modeling and NetLogo.
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Sulis, E., Taveter, K. (2022). Agent-Oriented Modeling. In: Agent-Based Business Process Simulation. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-98816-6_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-98816-6_5
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