One of the things I will have to get to grips with again for the a work project is agent based modelling, in particular agent based modelling business processes. While I haven’t played with Netlogo for a long time I remember that it was a nice easy place to start and I am not worried about getting back in to it, I am worried however that I know nothing about business processes. The place to start is to talk to people in the department that do know something about business modelling. Our strategy isn’t to use ABM on its own so I foresee lots of interesting conversations about different modelling techniques and how we explore business models that will feed in to the ABM side of things.
In the mean time I wanted to start playing with Netlogo again, perhaps get my head in some code. I decided the first thing to do would be to look for exisiting business modelling done in Netlogo, but I did not find much. Still, some starting points, I’ve started to explore models of knowledge transfer thinking that might be useful and the such:
Starting points
The SKIN model is a Netlogo model with the aim to simulate the behaviour of innovation networks in complex social systems. I have previous played with the code and one of the things that it reinforced was that Agent Based Modelling is sometimes a good way of introducing concepts, I’ve read about the model in various papers and playing with the model, which was written by the papers authors really helped me get my head around what they were trying to achieve.
This seems the go to model for supply chains, but recently a new model for supply chain analysis (Palm Oil Supply Chain in fact) went online on the Netlogo models hub. I also found a simulation game made in the 60s to explore distribution of goods. I think I may have come across this before when reading The Fifth Discipline and subsequently forgotten about it. There are plenty of Netlogo versions of the game. There are also some interesting papers that might point me in the right direction, Simulating Learning Networks in a Higher Education Blogosphere, and Improving Business Process Models with Agent-based Simulation and Process Mining The triple helix by Loet Leydesdorff might also be a place to start thinking about ways to start modelling in Netlogo.
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