Today I would like to discuss some questions about one of the key elements
that distinguish agents from objects – proactive behaviour.
Here is a citation from the Jennings et al. (1998) paper that discusses
amongst other things the difference between objects and agents: “The second
important distinction between object and agent systems is with respect to
the notion of flexible (reactive, proactive, social) autonomous behaviour.
The standard object model has nothing whatsoever to say about how to build
systems that integrate these types of behaviour.”
My questions are:
How can we trigger proactive behaviour (using OO-DES and JAVA)?
Is this normally a rule based process with a random component?
Do agents need to have situational awareness (about themselves and their
environment) to be able to act proactively?
I have identified the lack of proactiveness of my staff members as one of
the flaws in my current simulation models (Siebers et al, 2008 - Section 4.3).
Currently I’m working on implementing some proactive behaviour; in
particular as in the case study department store staff is encourage engaging
with the customers (i.e., to act proactively). I would like to model staff
members in a department store to act not only when their service is
requested but also self started (i.e. proactively). I found a definition of
proactiveness related to customer service which states that “proactive
customer service can be defined as an individual service employees’ self
started, long term oriented, and persistent service behaviour that goes
beyond explicitly prescribed requirements” (Rank et al., 2007).
How can this kind of behaviour be implemented in an ABS model?
You can find my paper on my website:
http://www.cs.nott.ac.uk/~pos/#Publications
Thanks for your comments,
Peer-Olaf Siebers
References:
Jennings, N.R., Sycara, K. and Wooldridge, M. (1998) 'A Roadmap of Agent
Research and Development', Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems, 1:7–38
Rank, J., Carsten, J.M., Unger, J.M. and Spector, P.E. (2007) 'Proactive
Customer Service Performance: Relationships With Individual, Task, and
Leadership Variables' Human Performance, 20(4):363-390
Siebers, P.O., Aickelin, U., Celia, H. and Clegg, C. (2008). 'An Agent-Based
Simulation of In-Store Customer Experiences', Proceedings of the 2008
Operational Research Society Simulation Workshop (SW08), Worcestershire, UK.
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