Approaches for Modeling Individuals Within Organizational Simulations

E. Hudlicka and G. Zacharias

R. G. Ingalls, M.D. Rosetti, J.S. Smith, and B.A. Peters, eds., 2004 Winter Simulation Conference, Washington, D.C. (December, 2004)

The human behavior modeling community has traditionally been divided into those addressing individual behavior models and those addressing organizational and team models. And yet it is clear that these extremes do not reflect the complex reality of the mutually-constraining interactions between an individual and his/her organizational environment. In this paper, we argue that realistic models of organizations may require not only models of a variety of individual decision-makers, but also explicit models of a variety of organizational differences influencing their decision-making and behavior (e.g. cognitive styles, personality traits, and affective states). Following a brief review of individual differences and cognitive architectures research, we describe two alternative approaches to modeling the individual within an organizational simulation: a cognitive architecture and a profile-based social network. We illustrate each approach with concrete examples from existing prototypes.

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