Integrating Multi-agent Simulations into Enterprise Application Landscapes

To cope with increasingly complex business, political, and economic environments, agent-based simulations (ABS) have been proposed for modeling complex systems such as human societies, transport systems, and markets. ABS enable experts to assess the influence of exogenous parameters (e.g., climate changes or stock market prices), as well as the impact of policies and their long-term consequences. Despite some successes, the use of ABS is hindered by a set of interrelated factors. First, ABS are mainly created and used by researchers and experts in academia and specialized consulting firms. Second, the results of ABS are typically not automatically integrated into the corresponding business process. Instead, the integration is undertaken by human users who are responsible for adjusting the implemented policy to take into account the results of the ABS. These limitations are exacerbated when the results of the ABS affect multi-party agreements (e.g., contracts) since this requires all involved actors to agree on the validity of the simulation, on how and when to take its results into account, and on how to split the losses/gains caused by these changes. To address these challenges, this paper explores the integration of ABS into enterprise application landscapes. In particular, we present an architecture that integrates ABS into cross-organizational enterprise resource planning (ERP) processes. As part of this, we propose a multi-agent systems simulator for the Hyperledger blockchain and describe an example supply chain management scenario type to illustrate the approach.