General modeling and simulation for enterprise operational decision-making problem: A policy-combination perspective

In such a competitive global context, enterprises have to continuously improve their operational capacity, leading to the existence of enterprise operational decision-making problems everywhere. This paper proposes a novel approach to explore these problems from a policy-combination perspective to help enterprises make globally optimal decisions. Accordingly, a new agent architecture Organism Model is presented to develop agent-based modeling and simulation, which is adapted from the representation of enterprises as sets of autonomous entities that perform actions, make decisions, learn from experiences, and interact according to defined rules. Following the approach, we implement a general and practical decision support tool for real-world problems as a proof-of-concept. Finally, an associated case study is conducted. © 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.