Modelling Socially Intelligent Agents - Bruce Edmonds

Modelling Organisations

One motivation of working towards capturing social behaviour, is that this is important in real (as opposed to planned or theoretical) organisational behaviour. To take two examples: it is known that emergent norms and other emergent social structures can greatly effect collective behaviour [11] and that social factors can make the prediction of organisational behaviour from the micro-level behaviour very difficult for managers as well as academics [6]. This concern with the veracity of modelling behaviour in organisations can be traced back to Herbert Simon's studies [20]. Here in addition to the dimension of procedurality we include sociality as a significant factor.

We model such organisations as populations of interacting agents in a given structure. We do not necessarily do this down to the level of individual persons but sometimes stay at the level of departments or even whole firms (if they are themselves interacting). Here a theme we are investigating is the contrast between the official (usually hierarchical) structure of the firm and the unofficial structures that emerge from the social interactions of the individuals.

In order to study such models, we have developed a modelling language called, SDML - a Strictly Declarative Modelling Language*1. This allows the flexible and theory-free modelling of intelligent agents in a declarative framework with object-orientated features, [8]. In particular this is particularly well suited for modelling organisations built up in many levels in a composite manner - it allows for better structured large organisational models involving more complex cognitive agents, compared to some other systems [17].

Modelling Socially Intelligent Agents - Bruce Edmonds - 17 DEC 97

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