Towards Better Crisis Management in Support Services Organizations Using Fine Grained Agent Based Simulation

Abstract

Critical support service operations have to run 24 × 7 and 365 days a year. Support operations therefore do contingency planning to continue operations during a crisis. In this paper we explore the use of fine-grained agent-based simulation models, which factor in human-behavioral dimensions such as stress, as a means to do better people planning for such situations. We believe the use of this approach may allow support operations managers to do more nuanced planning leading to higher resilience, and quicker return to normalcy. We model a prototypical support operation, which runs into different crisis severity levels, and show for each case, a reasonable size of the crisis team that would be required. We identify two contributions in this paper: First, emergency planning using agent based simulations have mostly focused, naturally, on societal communities such as urban populations. There has not been much attention paid to study crisis responses within support services organizations and our work is an attempt to address this deficit. Second, our use of grounded behavioral elements in our agent models allows us to build complex human behavior into the agents without sacrificing validity.