HOSS(-5) is an exploratory agent-based prototype of a small artificial society, written in Python. Each agent is a “ph” (punto humano, “human point”) that is born, is educated, works, consumes and dies. Its yearly decisions depend on a psychological profile (archetype × character), its economic status and its intentionality. Agents interact indirectly through families, firms in 10 sectors, a labour market with about 200 job categories, and a State that provides public services, employment and a Universal Basic Income, adjusting taxes and UBI each year to seek fiscal balance.

The model simulates a few thousand agents over decades of virtual time and records yearly aggregates (population, GDP, income, Gini index, HDI). A separate analysis script explores the results and fits Gamma distributions to individual incomes, comparing the shape parameter with Gini and HDI.

HOSS does not aim to predict real societies or claim empirical validation. It is a sandbox for comparing scenarios and thinking about the organizational design of society from an engineering perspective. Known limitations: no direct social relations between agents, prices and production follow simple rules rather than supply-demand dynamics, and organizations are black boxes.

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The Agent-Based Model for Multiple Team Membership (ABMMTM) simulates design teams searching for viable design solutions, for a large design project that requires multiple design teams that are working simultaneously, under different organizational structures; specifically, the impact of multiple team membership (MTM). The key mechanism under study is how individual agent-level decision-making impacts macro-level project performance, specifically, wage cost. Each agent follows a stochastic learning approach, akin to simulated annealing or reinforcement learning, where they iteratively explore potential design solutions. The agent evaluates new solutions based on a random-walk exploration, accepting improvements while rejecting inferior designs. This iterative process simulates real-world problem-solving dynamics where designers refine solutions based on feedback.

As a proof-of-concept demonstration of assessing the macro-level effects of MTM in organizational design, we developed this agent-based simulation model which was used in a simulation experiment. The scenario is a system design project involving multiple interdependent teams of engineering designers. In this scenario, the required system design is split into three separate but interdependent systems, e.g., the design of a satellite could (trivially) be split into three components: power source, control system, and communication systems; each of three design team is in charge of a design of one of these components. A design team is responsible for ensuring its proposed component’s design meets the design requirement; they are not responsible for the design requirements of the other components. If the design of a given component does not affect the design requirements of the other components, we call this the uncoupled scenario; otherwise, it is a coupled scenario.

Agent-based models of organizational search have long investigated how exploitative and exploratory behaviors shape and affect performance on complex landscapes. To explore this further, we build a series of models where agents have different levels of expertise and cognitive capabilities, so they must rely on each other’s knowledge to navigate the landscape. Model A investigates performance results for efficient and inefficient networks. Building on Model B, it adds individual-level cognitive diversity and interaction based on knowledge similarity. Model C then explores the performance implications of coordination spaces. Results show that totally connected networks outperform both hierarchical and clustered network structures when there are clear signals to detect neighbor performance. However, this pattern is reversed when agents must rely on experiential search and follow a path-dependent exploration pattern.