Demand function and its role in a business simulator

Business simulations are useful tools due to the fact that it eases management decision making. No doubt there are many processes which must be considered and simulated. Therefore, such business simulator is often composed of many processes and contains many agents and interrelations as well. Since the business simulator based on multi-agent system is characterized by many interrelations within, this article deals with a specific part of the business simulator only – a demand function and its modeling. The aim of this partial research is to suggest demand function which would be most suitable for the business simulation. In this paper a new approach for customer decision function in business process simulation was presented. The decision of the customer is based on Marshallian demand function and customer utility function using Cobb-Douglas preferences. The results obtained by means of the MAREA simulation environment proved that this approach yields correct simulation results.