Human-Agent Participation in a Business Simulator

Abstract

This paper proposes a novel approach to business simulator development in marketing domains. We are conducting an educational course, which consists of (i) a simple gaming experiment among human students and multiple software agents, (ii) home-made simulator implementation by the students themselves using a business model description language (BMDL), Agent Rules in Ruby Language, and a business model development system (BMDS). Our course is unique in the sense that, through the business simulation, we aim to develop students’ skills (1) to implement their own specific models of business firms, (2) to develop information systems for the firms, (3) to grasp decision making procedures by the players, and (4) to understand business processes among companies. This paper describes the background and motivation, basic principles, the architecture and implementation, and their experiments.