Using Intelligent Agents to Understand Management Practices and Retail Productivity

Intelligent agents offer a new and exciting way of understanding the world of work. In this paper we apply agent-based modeling and simulation to investigate a set of problems in a retail context. Specifically, we are working to understand the relationship between human resource management practices and retail productivity. Despite the fact we are working within a relatively novel and complex domain, it is clear that intelligent agents could offer potential for fostering sustainable organizational capabilities in the future. The project is still at an early stage. So far we have conducted a case study in a UK department store to collect data and capture impressions about operations and actors within departments. Furthermore, based on our case study we have built and tested our first version of a retail branch simulator which we will present in this paper.

Speculative document evaluation

Optimisation of real world Variable Data printing (VDP) documents is a dicult problem because the interdependencies between layout functions may drastically reduce the number of invariant blocks that can be factored out for pre-rasterisation. This paper examines how speculative evaluation at an early stage in a document-preparation pipeline, provides a generic and effective method of optimising VDP documents that contain such interdependencies. Speculative evaluation will be at its most effective in speeding up print runs if sets of layout invariances can either be discovered automatically, or designed into the document at an early stage. In either case the expertise of the layout designer needs to be supplemented by expertise in exploiting potential invariances and also in predicting the effects of speculative evaluation on the caches used at various stages in the print production pipeline.