Multi-agent Simulation of Knowledge Innovation Activities of University Research Team

Abstract

As research continues to fuel economic growth of many developing countries, such as in China, how to cultivate knowledge and resource has become increasingly important. Universities are widely regarded not only as teaching establishments but also as organizations that create new knowledge and innovation through research. Research teams are the main organizational nucleus in universities that create new knowledge (Chataway and Wield, 2000). However, a university research team in developing countries always does small-scale basic research solely, ignoring the influence of the academic and market environment as well as other reams. Actually, a research team can acquire extra knowledge, resources and information from the environment and from other teams. Therefore, understanding how a university research team to interact with other teams and the environment and the results of these interactions has become to a requirement to cultivate research team in universities. The university research team, in this paper, is seen as a multi-agent system consisting of two types of agent: the research team agent and the environment agent, then a multi-agent model is built using the Java programming language and the Swarm platform to simulate the knowledge innovation activities s of university research team in the process of interaction. We discuss the interpretations and implications of the simulation results finally.