Modelling Reactive and Proactive Behaviour in Simulation

TL;DR

This paper compares traditional discrete event and combined discrete event-agent based simulation models in representing reactive and proactive human behaviors within a retail fitting room, assessing their effectiveness and similarities.

Contribution

It demonstrates that simple proactive behaviors can be modeled in both simulation types and finds similar performance between the models in representing human behavior.

Findings

Proactive individual behavior can be effectively modeled.

Both simulation models produce similar outputs for human behavior.

The combined model does not significantly outperform the traditional model.

Abstract

This research investigated the simulation model behaviour of a traditional and combined discrete event as well as agent based simulation models when modelling human reactive and proactive behaviour in human centric complex systems. A departmental store was chosen as human centric complex case study where the operation system of a fitting room in WomensWear department was investigated. We have looked at ways to determine the efficiency of new management policies for the fitting room operation through simulating the reactive and proactive behaviour of staff towards customers. Once development of the simulation models and their verification had been done, we carried out a validation experiment in the form of a sensitivity analysis. Subsequently, we executed a statistical analysis where the mixed reactive and proactive behaviour experimental results were compared with some reactive experimental results from previously published works. Generally, this case study discovered that simple proactive individual behaviour could be modelled in both simulation models. In addition, we found the traditional discrete event model performed similar in the simulation model output compared to the combined discrete event and agent based simulation when modelling similar human behaviour.