Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Table 2. Selected interview statements concerning contact frequencies and their transformation
into agent rules
Interview statement
Interpretation
Agent rules
“I only meet the others once a
month when we have the assem-
bly” (economic stakeholder)
Meeting events are
simulated in different
frequencies for each
agent group
Political stake-
holders meet each
other more often
than the other
groups
“So I'm also in the county
council, that brings us together
every two weeks for different
purposes” (political stakeholder)
“There is not a single day with-
out contact to one of the other
mayors” (political stakeholder)
Assembly meetings are organized by the Regional Management. Analysis of the
documents revealed that they were always summoned for the second Wednesday of a
month, in case a sufficient number of projects were ready to be decided upon. The
Regional Management agent sends out invitations to the assembly member agents by
inserting the date in their schedules, whereupon they decide whether to attend. Again,
from the assembly documents it was evident that its members chose not to attend at an
average rate of 20% of the meetings, which was used as a general no-show probabili-
ty. Thus, the present assembly members are defined and their network lists are up-
dated using the above mentioned mechanism.
Time intervals
between meetings
range from daily
to once a month
4.2
Discussions and Decisions in the Regional Assembly
In the simulated discussions, the present assembly member agents bring forward ar-
guments from the pool of available arguments (fig. 1). The course of the discussion is
logged by the regional management agent. Because a clear assignment of argument
categories to groups of agents is not empirically supported, the starting point of
discussions is chosen at random. However, depending on the category of the
project in question, arguments are preselected in a way that is consistent with the
meetings' observation results. Figure 3 shows a simulated course of discussion as an
example.
When the discussion has come to an end, the assembly members entitled to vote
decide about each project application. A project is approved if the number of support-
ing votes is greater than that of dissenting votes. In this case, the application is
removed from the list of pending projects and its budget subtracted from the total
budget available.
Search WWH ::




Custom Search