A Formal Approach to Building Compositional Agent-Based Simulations

Why Read This Chapter? To be introduced to a more formal “computer-science” style of simulation design, especially suited to simulations of multi-level systems (e.g. firms, departments, and people). Abstract This chapter is an introduction to a more formal approach to designing agent-based simulations of organisations (in the widest sense). The basic method is the iterative refinement of structure, process and knowledge, decomposing each abstraction into near-decomposable components that can be (for the most part) then considered separately. Within this over all framework there are two complementary approaches: designing the organisation first, and designing the individual agents first.