CAS theory as developed by John Holland along with three nobel prize
winners and others a the Santa Fe Institute, has become the most powerful
means of modeling, experimenting with, and measuring self-organizing
behavior in teams, organizations, and economies. (It is also being used to
model the brain, the rain forest, culture, etc.)
When I translated the Beer Game into a CAS model using a method and
modeling language called OOCL and then simulated it in the CAS Swarm
simulator, the results were amazing.
We then created a model of the players and facilitator of the beer game
itself and measured the amount of learning that took place based on how
the facilitator changed given variables.
The learning was measured by A. confirming changes to the internal model
that each agent has B. determine the increase in performance when the set
of agents were given another "game" that was similar.
We can measure the influence of the facilitator on the agents. The
Faciltator can act as a metaagent that manipulates the environment seeking
the most optimal learning transfer environment.
We can record the changes to the internal model to latter determine what
changes caused the greatest transfer of learning. These are only a few of
many possible measures.
We are now building a model of clusters of agents using a common
information pool that is contributed to and used by the agents. This is a
model of team knowledge sharing based on shared knowledge pools.
The CAS modeling approach is rapidly becoming a powerful instrument for
economic modeling, stock market modeling, business modeling, etc. by many
Institutions. My web page below has a link to many CAS resources.
Anyone on this list using CAS modeling and simulation or are interested?
Edward Swanstrom
Agilis Labs
edswan@erols.com
http://www.agiliscorp.com
--Ed Swanstrom <edswan@erols.com>
Learning-org -- An Internet Dialog on Learning Organizations For info: <rkarash@karash.com> -or- <http://world.std.com/~lo/>