A First Approach on Modelling Staff Proactiveness in Retail Simulation
  Models
  There has been a noticeable shift in the relative composition of the industry
in the developed countries in recent years; manufacturing is decreasing while
the service sector is becoming more important. However, currently most
simulation models for investigating service systems are still built in the same
way as manufacturing simulation models, using a process-oriented world view,
i.e. they model the flow of passive entities through a system. These kinds of
models allow studying aspects of operational management but are not well suited
for studying the dynamics that appear in service systems due to human
behaviour. For these kinds of studies we require tools that allow modelling the
system and entities using an object-oriented world view, where intelligent
objects serve as abstract "actors" that are goal directed and can behave
proactively. In our work we combine process-oriented discrete event simulation
modelling and object-oriented agent based simulation modelling to investigate
the impact of people management practices on retail productivity. In this
paper, we reveal in a series of experiments what impact considering proactivity
can have on the output accuracy of simulation models of human centric systems.
The model and data we use for this investigation are based on a case study in a
UK department store. We show that considering proactivity positively influences
the validity of these kinds of models and therefore allows analysts to make
better recommendations regarding strategies to apply people management
practises.
