Understanding Your Business through Home-Made Simulator Development

This paper discusses a novel approach to a business simulator course. The course we are developing consists of (i) Simple gaming experiment among multiple students using Alexander Islands, a tiny business simulator on the WWW; (ii) Lectures to let students to understand the core concepts of systems management through the simulation; and (iii) Home-made simulation model development by the students themselves using a business model description language (BMDL) and a business model development system (BMDS). Our course is unique in the sense that, through the business simulation, we aim to develop students' skills (1) to implement their own specific models of business firms, (2) to develop information systems for the firms, and (3) to understand business processes among companies. This paper describes the background and motivation, basic principles, the architecture and implementation of BMDL/BMDS, and experimental results.