Transparency, consistency and modularity of strategic reasoning: An agent architecture for interactive business simulations

Interactive business simulations are widely used to explore and compare business strategies from both practice and theory. In many business simulations however, educators and researchers lack support in observing how the simulated actors operationalize their strategies, in validating whether operations have been aligned with the strategy, and also in (re)configuring available player and opponent strategies based on new theoretical or practical insights. This paper specifies requirements for a novel business simulation architecture that facilitates transparency, consistency and modularity of strategic decision making by simulated actors in interactive business simulations. A system architecture is proposed that integrates three components: an extensible agent middleware, a distributed simulation engine and a modular reasoning framework. How the architecture fulfills the three requirements of strategic reasoning transparency, consistency and modularity is illustrated in a use case of a business simulation game for supply chain management education.