Demo Paper: AGADE: Using communities of agents to provide realistic feedback in business simulations

Abstract

The need to provide realistic feedback against decisions made within business games is a requirement if business games are to continue to remain relevant in training towards increasingly complex business scenarios. We attempt to address this problem by using software agents to simulate individuals and to model their actions in response to business decisions. In our initial studies we use agent technologies to simulate consumers who will make buying decisions based on their own preferences and those within their social network. Other applications are search for structure in complex contexts, or verification of predicted values based on theoretical considerations. In this demo paper we present the tool set AGADE (Agile Agent Development Environment) which incorporates agent based and semantic technologies to address this. It is applied to simulate different market mechanisms in a mobile phone market.