Modeling Beer Game as Role-Play Collaborative Learning via Fuzzy Constraint-Directed Agent Negotiation

This paper presents a fuzzy constraint-directed approach to the development of agent-based business simulator for supporting collaborative learning. The advantages of this approach can be summarized in two folds: it provides (1) a general purpose framework for the knowledge representation and problem solving in business simulation, and (2) a fully distributed computational model along with a negotiation algorithm that can be easily built to mimic more closely to the real-world scenario of collaborative strategic planning and decision making. To demonstrate the usefulness of the proposed framework, we have prototyped a business simulator, MANAGE, and applied successfully to build a beer game for collaborative learning.