The issue of interest here is the behaviour of decision agents in supply chain management. The study uses a managerial framework to organize supply-related tasks to the behaviour of specific instantiations of decision agents. The reasons why organizations might elect to invest supply chain management responsibilities in decision agents rather than human functionaries are illustrated. Finally, t...

The complex and interconnected world in which organizations operate presents many challenges to organizational sustainability and the traditional approaches audit firms use to assess the ongoing viability of their clients. We propose agent-based modeling (ABM) as a viable tool for auditors to account for the interaction of local and environmental factors to determine organizational success. To ...

Modern safety-critical organizations are characterized by complex, nonlinear dynamics involving many interrelated actors and processes. Safety issues that emerge from these complex dynamics increasingly remain hidden, until an incident or even a serious accident occurs. Traditional safety analysis methods developed long ago for much simpler organizations cannot help identifying, explaining and ...

There exists a need within many large organizations and their partners to operate cross-organizational Web applications. This paper introduces the WebComposition Service Linking System (WSLS), a component-based and serviceoriented system which makes extensive use of Web Services and other standardized Internet technology in order to support development, maintenance and management of reusable an...

Adaptation to changes in organizational procedures and business rules is a sine qua non for workflow management systems, if they have to be useful to organizations. This paper describes an approach based on workflow agents capable of managing dynamic changes in business policies. The two key aspects of our approach are (i) the agentification of the process engine, in the sense that this is view...

In logistics of today’s economy we have to deal with distributed systems. To support the demanding management task the multi-agent approach offers promising perspectives. For human organizations a socio-technical system is to be handled. The theory of organizational cybernetics provides basic knowledge about structuretheoretic foundations to reach organizational fitness. For the design of manag...

Understanding complex socio-economic systems is a key problem for commercial organizations. In this chapter we discuss the use of agent-based modelling to produce decision support tools to enhance this understanding. We consider the important aspects of the model creation process which include the facilitation of dialogue necessary to extract knowledge, the building of understanding, and the id...

The globalization of competition has entailed that organizations of developed countries have to face new kind of competitors with low labour cost, and often-advantageous exchange rates (resulting in favourable export selling prices). In such a scenario, innovation and organizational flexibility are becoming fundamental levers to enable enterprises to increase their competitiveness. For this rea...

Much of the impact of a policy depends on how it is implemented, especially as mediated by organizations such as schools or hospitals. Furthermore, implementation depends on each organization’s capacity to absorb innovations. Here we extend the concept of absorptive capacity to include the intra-organizational network dynamics that occur during the implementation of an innovation. In particular...

In the paper we present a fresh approach to viewing the technological and business and organizational aspects of agent-based systems utilized in industrial and manufacturing environments. Based on experience coming both from intensive research activities carried out by the authors’ organizations, and exposure to real market needs and technology utilization potential, our approach focuses on pro...