Simulating the emergent behavior of complex software-intensive organizations

Organizations are composed of individuals and groups of individuals who interact with their local neighbors. These individuals and groups inherently have limited horizons both with whom they interact and in what information they can access. Because of this limited visibility no one individual can "see" the edges of the universe in which they live and in this sense the system can be considered unbounded. A major characteristic of unbounded systems is the fact that global behavior can emerge which cannot be predicted from local actions. These issues have direct relevance to the understanding of software-intensive organizations. However, performing experimental investigations to assess these organizational properties is virtually impossible. Thus we need a simulation language in which unbounded systems and emergent properties can be simulated and examined. Few, if any existing simulation languages explicitly provide the appropriate mechanisms and this has motivated the development of the Easel language, the topic of this paper.