Modeling a Virtual Food Court Using DECAF

Modeling of economic phenomena principally proceeds on two levels, the microeconomic and the macroeconomic. Microeconomic theory explains economic decisions made at the level of the firm and the individual. Other fields of study also explain these decisions. In particular, organizational theory explains the organizational decisions made by individual participants. Since voluntary organizational decisions are most likely made by self-interested parties, organizational decisions in an economic market are subject to explanation by (at least) two different fields of study. This paper describes initial work on economic modeling, including the modeling of voluntary organizational contracts, of a set of business entities set in the market context of the food court at an upscale suburban mall, the Virtual Food Court (VFC). DECAF is an multi-agent system building toolkit that provides this effort with (1) a GUI to easily establish the control mechanisms needed to express exchanges (“conversations”) between participants and (2) the operating system features to perform the message sending and receiving that models the actual transactions. DECAF provides high-level language support and pre-built middle-agents for building multi-agent systems across typical TCP/IP-based networks. By taking an “agent operating system” approach rather than the “API” approach to creating agents, DECAF has been shown to help researchers or students get to the “interesting” parts of a multi-agent system or simulation more quickly.