Simulating the impact of business process management agents and human factors

Abstract

Business cooperation between companies is becoming popular in the world, which has brought changes to the management of business processes. Inter-organizational process management is widely required. We propose agent-based groupware, which realizes open and distributed business systems. In this groupware, agents act as interfaces between people and the business system. They also coordinate multiple jobs, people, and organizations. However it is very difficult to introduce, evaluate, and evolve agent-based groupware, because it is very difficult to estimate and test the effect of introducing agents into the real workplace. Human behavior is also a very important factor; because some people get accustomed to using the system, but others do not. To evaluate human behavior as well as agents' and processes we have been developing a simulator. This paper gives a simulation model which has some original aspects, describes the simulator and shows results of simulation.