Modelización y simulación discreta para tratar con problemas de toma de decisiones:El problema del Bar El Farol

Abstract

Can you use discrete modelling and simulation to investigate how individuals “reason”, “think” or “decide” in “complex” situations which are not well defined or controlled? To answer this question, a “real situation” to work on with students is proposed. Discrete modelling and simulation is introduced in the classroom as a tool to investigate the decision making and adaptive systems through a set of tasks that revolve around the following context: weekly occupation of a public resource by a population from the individual decision to go or not, with the purpose or desire not to coincide with too many individuals, and with the historical occupation of this resource in previous weeks being the only information available for making the decision. The students develop and analyse different strategies of discrete modelling to implement in a spread sheet and generate computational experiments or simulations with them in order to deal with this situation. Noting the limitations of this type of simulation displays, a specific programming environment for individual-based models (NetLogo) is introduced to continue with the study of this situation from the El Farol Bar problem. The final assessment of the students' activity was very positive as they discovered that what initially appeared to be an “unwieldy” problem, with the aid of a computer, going to be a manageable problem, possible to be investigated and analysed.