[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]
Combining antropology & complexity science, anyone?
From: |
Jurgen van der Pol |
Subject: |
Combining antropology & complexity science, anyone? |
Date: |
Wed, 28 Nov 2001 00:18:25 +0200 |
LS,
Does anybody know of, or has any pointer to any information,
references, work done in our community on the combination of
complexity science and antropology (c.q. psychology/social sciences
in general)?
What I'm after is no less than to model a human being. That is,
figure out some form of acceptable abstraction of it's
'particularities'. After due deliberation the past year, I've come to
the conclusion that when applying complexity science theory to
management science issues (as I'm trying to do in my PhD), the human
factor (or elements of) is often missing or abstracted beyond
recognition in lots of the work that's (being) done so far (then
again, my literature study is not complete so fire away).
Case in point: John Sterman's Beer Distribution Game. Comes out of
the system dynamics corner, simulates a supply chain (retail outlet,
wholesaler, factory ect) for beer (or any other good). 'Market'
demand rises once in round 2 of the game and stays flat ever after,
inventories in the supply chain go bullwhippingly out of control
nonetheless. Now, try to model this in an agent based modelling
environment. Yes, you can have the supply chain's constituents, and
have beer shipped around. But how do you 'model' e.g. the
wholesaler's 'anxiety' of running out of stock and thus a.o. cause
the bullwhip effect? I'm at a complete loss on how to do that, save
for a random number generation on an 'anxiety' gene in an agent but
that's just too simple to my taste.
Other example; I can have a supply chain modelled to what we know of
ant behaviour, but how do I capture the fact that warehouse manager A
hates the guts of warehouse manager B and thus goes out to have his
coffee first rather than responding to the urgent urgent fax from Mr.
B, thus causing the whole supply chain to become unbalanced?
All this ran me into considering 'les particularites humaine' as a
modelling layer -on top of- a simple thing (sic) like a supply chain.
Can I construct a bunch of agents that 'just interact' and display
human behaviour in all it's idiocraties? Thus, I (think I) need to
somehow bridge a gap between what we know on human behaviour through
antropology (yes, human behaviour -is- predictable to some extent)
and complexity science/ABM etcetera. So I need to know whether
something similar has alrady been considered, tried, written up,
modelled, referenced, ...
Anyways, hope this makes some sense. Also hope someone can either set
me straight and/or help me on my way in this...
Thanks, cheers,
Jurgen van der Pol
==================================
Swarm-Modelling is for discussion of Simulation and Modelling techniques
esp. using Swarm. For list administration needs (esp. [un]subscribing),
please send a message to <address@hidden> with "help" in the
body of the message.
==================================
- Re: slightly off-topic: support open source for publically-fundedresearch, (continued)
- Re: slightly off-topic: support open source for publically-funded research, glen e. p. ropella, 2001/11/17
- Re: slightly off-topic: support open source for publically-funded research, Marcus G. Daniels, 2001/11/17
- Re: slightly off-topic: support open source for publically-funded research, Russell Senior, 2001/11/17
- Re: slightly off-topic: support open source for publically-funded research, glen e. p. ropella, 2001/11/20
- Re: slightly off-topic: support open source for publically-funded research, Darren Schreiber, 2001/11/20
- Re: slightly off-topic: support open source for publically-funded research, glen e. p. ropella, 2001/11/20
- Combining antropology & complexity science, anyone?,
Jurgen van der Pol <=
- Re: Combining antropology & complexity science, anyone?, Norberto Eiji Nawa, 2001/11/27
- Re: Combining antropology & complexity science, anyone?, M Lang / S Railsback, 2001/11/27
- Re: Combining antropology & complexity science, anyone?, glen e. p. ropella, 2001/11/28
Re: slightly off-topic: support open source for publically-funde, matt, 2001/11/19