Roman Šperka

Silesian University in Opava · Department of Business Economics and Management

Although much literature has focused on prejudice-based traditional bullying, there are not a lot of studies about prejudice-based cyberbullying. This kind of cyberbullying reflects any form of cyberbullying based on a group affiliation or identity characteristics of the victim, often including historically marginalised and other “protected charact...

The deployment of information and communication technologies in organizations is on the rise. Many organizations consider the application of technologies to be a crucial key to improve their processes. However, traditional costing systems are not suitable for cost estimation of business processes due to the use of volume-based cost drivers, which a...

Business process simulations (BPS) are considered a relevant and highly applicable method of analysis. BPS allow analysis of business processes under different conditions. There are several approaches towards simulation of business processes such as discrete event simulations (DES), agent-based modelling and simulation (ABMS) or system dynamics (SD...

When a company decides to automate its business processes by means of RPA (Robotic Process Automation), there are two fundamental questions that need to be answered. Firstly, what activities should the company automate and what characteristics make them suitable for RPA. The aim of the presented research is to design and demonstrate a data-driven p...

Business process simulations provide a flexible approach to analyze business processes through simulation experiments using various ‘what if’ questions. Many business process simulation tools provide means for assessment of quality and efficiency of business processes; however, the possibilities of cost dimension simulation are being neglected. The...

Costing systems play a crucial role in many managerial decisions; thus, it is crucial that costing systems provide appropriate information. Time-driven activity-based costing systems (TDABC) are successors of activity-based costing systems (ABC). ABCs were created in order to address shortcomings of traditional costing systems, while TDABCs were cr...

This book highlights new trends and challenges in research on agents and the new digital and knowledge economy. It includes papers on business process management, agent-based modeling and simulation, and anthropic-oriented computing that were originally presented at the 15th International KES Conference on Agents and Multi-Agent Systems: Technologi...

Purpose The need for assuring correctness of business processes in enterprises is widely recognised in terms of business process re-engineering and improvement. Formal methods are a promising approach to this issue. The challenge in business process verification is to create a formal model that is well-aligned to the reality. Process mining is a we...

The book highlights new trends and challenges in research on agents and the new digital and knowledge economy. It includes papers on business process management, agent-based modeling and simulation and anthropic-oriented computing that were originally presented at the 14th International KES Conference on Agents and Multi-Agent Systems: Technologies...

This book highlights new trends and challenges in research on agents and the new digital and knowledge economy. It includes papers on business- process management, agent-based modeling and simulation, and anthropic-oriented computing, which were originally presented at the 13th International KES Conference on Agents and Multi-Agent Systems – Techno...

Background and Purpose: Motivation of this research is to explore the current trend in automating the business processes through software robots (Robotic Process Automation – RPA) and its managing within enterprise environment where most of the processes are executed by human workforce. As the RPA technology expands the demand for its coordinating...

The simulation and modelling paradigms have significantly shifted in recent years under the influence of the Industry 4.0 concept. There is a requirement for a much higher level of detail and a lower level of abstraction within the simulation of a modelled system that continuously develops. Consequently, higher demands are placed on the constructio...

Businesses and business decisions are getting driven by the information gained from the data more and more nowadays. The number of businesses supporting and managing their processes through the use of information systems and new technologies is growing every day. Even though, there is still a lot of rigidity in the implementation of new technologie...

Background and Purpose: Agent-based modelling and simulation (ABS) is growing in many areas like, e.g., management, social and computer sciences. However, the similar trend does not seem to occur within the field of business process management (BPM), even though simulation approaches like discrete event simulation or system dynamics are well establ...

A multi-agent system is a useful modeling architecture in business process modeling in the sense that we can naturally implement participants in a real company with software agents. However, analyzing and interpreting the simulation results of multi-agent models tends to be difficult due to the inherent complexity of the models. In this regard, ano...

cBackground and Purpose: Part-time employment could be seen as a modern form of employment or a type of innovative organizational change. The average share of part-time jobs in the Czech Republic in the observed period of 2004-2016 was 3.9 % according to the OECD, in comparison to the average OECD value of 16.6%. The main question to arise was, are...

Entrepreneurship is a vital element of development of today’s economies. Its main objective is to undertake actions intended to ensure that economic resources of individual companies are coordinated in a pragmatic and productive manner. Entrepreneurship may be considered in two respects: (1) processes – activities aimed at forming and building a ne...

The aim of this paper is to convert the real data from the raw format from different information systems (log files) to the format, which is suitable for process mining analysis of a production process in a large automotive company. The conversion process will start with the import from several relational databases. The motivation is to use the DIS...

The aim of this paper is to present the use of a decision function in the implementation of a multi-agent simulation model of a small-sized enterprise dealing with trading. The subject of the presented research are simulation experiments in MAREA software framework, which was designed to simulate trading behaviour of a trading company. Firstly, we...

Research background: Managerial scientists use a lot of modelling techniques for business processes. In this paper we are focused on agent-based modelling and simulations, which emerged in the last two decades as a new approach. Autonomous and interacting intelligent agents are able to model and simulate complex systems in the business sphere. With...

MAREA Trading Simulations Experiments with the Focus on Marketing Campaign The aim of this paper is to present the use of innovation of decision function in the implementation of a multi-agent simulation model of a trading company with focus on marketing campaigns. We modeled a real trading company dealing with retailing of cables The subject of th...

The aim of this paper is to investigate the impact of financial transaction taxes (FTTs) on the stability of financial markets. This paper presents an agent-based financial market model and simulations in which agents follow technical and fundamental trading rules to determine their speculative investment positions. The model developed by Westerhof...

The main goal of this paper is to compare the results of an agent-based and Monte Carlo simulation experiments in business process negotiation between sellers and customers of a simple trading commodity. The motivation of the presented research is to find suitable method for predicting key performance indicators of a business company. The intention...

The paper introduces e-learning support for the eGovernment implementation in public administration services in Czech Republic in 2015. There are many contemporary approaches in studying the public administration courses in Czech universities. One of them, and maybe the most successful, is the e-learning in the form of Learning Management System. E...

In recent years, there has been rising interest in a field called behavioral finance, which incorporates psychological methods in analysing investor behavior. The aim of this chapter is to study the technical and the fundamental investing strategy of financial market participants dealing with assets. The motivation of the presented research is to s...

The aim of the paper is to introduce a novel multi-agent simulation approach and its application allowing to deal with the trading processes of a virtual company. The motivation is to use implemented simulation framework as a basic part of an information system, operating as an integrated component of an actual ERP system implemented within a compa...

The main goal of this paper is to compare the results of an agent-based and Monte Carlo simulation experiments in business process negotiation between sellers and customers of a simple trading commodity. The motivation of the presented research is to find suitable method for predicting key performance indicators of a business company. The intention...

The aim of the paper is to describe the seller-to-customer negotiation in the business processes (sales) of a virtual company. Based on it we propose an innovative approach to simulate, investigate and to predict some of the key performance indicators of a trading company. The methods used to implement the simulation framework in the form of multi-...

The aim of this paper is to investigate the impact of financial transaction tax (FTT) on the stability of financial market. The paper presents an agent-based financial market model and simulations, in which agents follow technical and fundamental trading rules to determine their speculative investment positions. The model developed by Westerhoff (2...

Agents and multi-agent systems are related to a modern software paradigm which has long been recognized as a promising technology for constructing autonomous, complex and intelligent systems. The topics covered in this volume include agent-oriented software engineering, agent co-operation, co-ordination, negotiation, organization and communication,...

The aim of this paper is to propose an experimental business management approach to cover a seller-to-customer price negotiation in an agent-based simulations. The core element in this approach is the price negotiation. We used Marshallian demand function and a Cobb-Douglas utility function in the negotiation process. Moreover, multi-agent model is...

The aim of the paper is to present an enhanced software simulation application based on a trading company control loop and to validate agents’ behavior from simulation experiments using simple Petri net, and social network analysis. The main purpose of the application is to improve existing decision support systems with the use of a simulation. The...

The aim of this paper is to introduce microeconomic demand functions (Marshallian demand function and Cobb-Douglas utility function) in Java simulation experiments. The motivation is to use these function as a core element in a seller-to-customer price negotiation in an agent-based simulations. Furthermore, multi-agent model is proposed and impleme...

The aim of the paper is to propose an e-learning system architecture integrating knowledge flows. Our motivation is to provide the user with some intelligent possibilities of the learning environment used. This could be fulfilled using knowledge management at the operational level. Knowledge management should be a fundamental objective of any educa...

We implement an agent-based simulation of financial market model. Agent-based simulations are used nowadays as an alternative to the traditional models, based on predetermined equilibrium state theory. Agent technology brings some kind of local intelligence and rational expectations to the decision support system of financial market participants. A...

The motivation of this paper is to introduce basic concepts of the modeling and simulation concerning simple business processes of a generic business company. The novel method described in this paper is the basis for further research at Silesian University in Opava, School of Business Administration in Karvina, Department of Informatics supported b...

The aim of this paper is to study the influence of Tobin tax on the stability of financial market in the simulation. Particularly, risk analysis is introduced. The method, which is the core of this contribution, is agent-based modeling and simulation. This method is often used to study complex social systems. Agent-based model consists of a set of...

The aim of this paper is to propose an innovative simulation approach involving customer behavior in the trading processes of a virtual company. Agent-based modeling and simulation techniques are used to implement a multi-agent system to serve as a simulation framework. Our motivation is to use the framework as a basic part of a management system,...

This paper deals with the log files suitable to extract valuable information about agents and their behaviour from agent-based simulation in a model of virtual company. Such information, presented in a transparent way, can be used as a support for simulation verification to achieve the suitable design of the proposed system. Hence, based on the sim...

The motivation of the paper is to introduce an agent-based business process model in the Java simulation experiment. A virtual company trading processes are simulated in order to use proposed methods as a part of a decision support tool. As in other cases, such simulation needs sufficient input parameters. However, in the case of business systems,...

One of the efficient methods of business process simulation is the use of a multi-agent system. As on other cases, such simulation requires sufficient input data. However, in the case of business systems, real business data is not always available, therefore multi-agent systems often operate with randomly (or pseudo randomly) generated parameters....

The motivation of this paper was to model and to implement an innovative approach to simulate the trading processes of a virtual business company. Agent-based methods together with the Java development platform are used to implement a multi-agent system to serve as a simulation framework. The framework should be a basic part of a decision support s...

The motivation of the paper is to introduce agent-based technology in the business process simulation. As in other cases, such simulation needs sufficient input data. However, in the case of business systems, real business data are not always available. Therefore, multi-agent systems often operate with randomly (resp. pseudo randomly) generated par...

Knowledge extraction from data in the form of rules is a widespread direction in data mining area, which allows to obtain interesting relationships in data from large databases in for a human easily understandable form. This paper deals with one of the methods for extraction of rules from data which extract rules in form of a formula in considered...

The aim of this paper is to propose an innovative approach to describe the customer behavior in the trading processes of a virtual company. Agent-based modeling and simulation techniques are used to implement a multi-Agent system to serve as a simulation framework. The framework should be a basic part of a management system operating in the integra...

Computational social science involves the use of agent-based modeling and simulation (ABMS) to study complex social systems. ABMS consists of a set of agents and a framework for simulating their decisions and interactions. ABMS is related to a variety of other simulation techniques, including discrete event simulation and distributed artificial int...

This paper deals with the agent-based simulation. The aim of the paper supported by the hypothesis is to prove positive impact of Tobin tax introduction to-gether with the risk analysis on the stability of financial market. The core of the pa-per is the Java implementation of the multi-agent system being served as simulation framework. Multi-agent...

The paper deals with modeling and simulation of business processes. A multiagent system was implemented as a tool to manage the simulation. Multiagent systems often operate with random (respectively pseudorandom) generated parameters in order to represent unpredictable phenomena. The aiml of the paper is to show the influence of different random nu...

Electronic commerce (e-commerce) has the potential to improve the competitiveness of the enterprises. A decision support system, used in e-commerce, is a term used to describe any software engine that enhances the user's ability to make decisions. The paper presents a new approach for decision support system modeling. This approach is applied by a...

Multi-agent systems are commonly used for simulation purposes. The authors focused on agent-based technology in the business process simulation, especially on the analysis of the agent-based simulation outputs in order to facilitate the verification of the used methodology. The paper deals with an analysis of agents' behavior in multi-agent model o...

Business intelligence is a business management term used to describe applications and technologies which are used to gather, provide access to, and analyse data and information about the organization, to help make better business decisions. The multi-agent approach provides a feasible solution for construction of the business intelligence system. T...

We implement an agent-based financial market model simulation in which agents follow technical and fundamental trading rules to determine their speculative investment positions. We consider direct interactions between speculators due to which they may decide to change their trading behaviour. For instance, if a technical trader meets a fundamental...