Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
decent townscapes” (61)), the majority of the stakeholders in the Swedish region were
frustrated with spending funds for renovating and modernizing rural building struc-
tures simply to replace owners' commitment to their real estate, or that soon after-
wards decayed.
4
Transferring the Analyzed Communicative and Behavioral
Regularities into Activity Rules for an Agent Model
This section will now focus on the derivation of agent rules for the simulation from
the results of the qualitative analysis of the communication structures and regularities
in the stakeholders' actions. The procedure follows an ontology developed by [8] that
requires defining 'endurances' (physical and non-physical objects and constructs ex-
isting invariantly throughout the time span of the analysis) and perdurances (processes
and constructs changing over time such as actions or events). In this case, endurances
doubtless include the submitted projects and the involved stakeholders. Furthermore,
also the development goals of stakeholders and their discussion arguments fall into
this category, as empirical evidence from the observation of the discussions suggested
that they remain relatively stable over the time of the analysis. Which of the available
arguments were applied in the discussions however, is a result of the decisions of the
stakeholders, which are thus to be termed perdurances and subsumed in their activity
rules.
As endurances, two agent classes
1
were implemented, labeled as 'regional mana-
gament' and 'regional stakeholder'. Each agent of the latter class adopts three of a
total of eight possible 'roles' that correspond to the involved stakeholder groups (po-
litical, economical, social, administrative i.e. county administration representatives
supervising the legal consistency of the process) and also indicate whether an assem-
bly member possesses a voting right, which is regulated by the internal rules of pro-
cedure of the assembly. This also allows agents to assume multiple roles; in one case
for instance, a hotel owner, officially a representative of the economic sector in the
assembly, is also the mayor of her municipality, and hence inherits activity rules for
both roles. The remaining endurances (projects, discussion arguments and develop-
ment goals) are implemented as 'resources' classes. 'Resources' in the terminology of
the used software refers to objects possessing state variables but no activities.
The process of transferring the empirically identified perdurances into agent activi-
ty rules follows a three-step procedure of empirical evidence, its interpretation
and derived agent rules, which will be presented in table format as suggested by [4].
This will be performed separately for the issues contacts/meetings/networks of stake-
holders, discussions and decisions in the assembly, and project design/stakeholder
cooperation.
1
The simulation is implemented in the software „SeSAm“ developed by the Artifical Intelli-
gence working group at the University of Würzburg, Germany. More information can be ob-
tained at www.simsesam.de.
