Intelligent Tuning of a Dynamic Business Simulation Environment

One important use of simulation tools is to use an existing base-model of a business, representing the systems of interest, and then modelling and testing alternative scenarios by making changes to this base-model. This way, business managers can estimate the consequences of policy changes without having to actually introduce them into the business. The act of ensuring the continuous validity of a base model in a continuously changing business is called Tuning. In this paper, we investigate how heuristic based optimisation algorithms like Evolutionary Algorithms can be used to improve the tuning of a dynamic business simulation environment, within the framework of a software called WDS. We test a number of different algorithms on this problem, using two different encoding-schemes and evaluate the results.

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