The Living Value Chain - Coordinating Business Processes with Artificial Life Agents

Abstract

The development of IT systems for coordinating business processes mostly starts with the definition of coordination mechanisms and organizational structures. This is usually based on assumptions about the cooperational behavior of the participating individuals. This top-down approach fails if the human participants behave in a competitive way, which can severely affect coordination as a whole. Artificial life concepts maintain global coordination by modeling local interaction rules and building on competition between individuals. This basic idea is exploited here in an economic context to show the possibility of coordinating business processes, like value chains, by autonomous self-interested software agents. We set up an artificial world where agents, representing human participants, cooperate and communicate using economically interpretable protocols. Starting from a given initial state of an economic agent population, the development of this population by applying local agent interaction rules and the observable coordination patterns will be investigated. We are currently in progress of implementing the simulation named Avalanche.

Keywords: multiagent systems, business process, coordination theory, artificial life

JEL Classification: C72