Brahms: simulating practice for work systems design

A continuing problem in business today is the design of human-computer syst ems that respect how work actually gets done. The overarching context of wo rk consists of activities, which people conceive as ways of organizing thei r daily life and especially their interactions with each other. Activities include reading mail, going to workshops, meeting with colleagues over lunc h, answering phone calls, and so on. Brahms is a multiagent simulation tool for modeling the activities of groups in different locations and the physi cal environment consisting of objects and documents, including especially c omputer systems. A Brahms model of work practice reveals circumstantial, in teractional influences on how work actually gets done, especially how peopl e involve each other in their work. In particular, a model of practice reve als how people accomplish a collaboration through multiple and alternative means of communication, such as meetings, computer tools, and written docum ents. Choices of what and how to communicate are dependent upon social beli efs and behaviors-what people know about each other's activities, intention s, and capabilities and their understanding of the norms of the group. As a result, Brahms models can help human-computer system designers to understa nd how tasks and information actually flow between people and machines, wha t work is required to synchronize individual contributions, and how tools h inder or help this process. In particular, workflow diagrams generated by B rahms are the emergent product of local interactions between agents and rep resentational artifacts, not pre-ordained, end-to-end paths built in by a m odeler. We developed Brahms as a tool to support the design of work by illu minating how formal flow descriptions relate to the social systems of work; we accomplish this by incorporating multiple views-relating people, inform ation, systems, and geography-in one tool. Applications of Brahms could als o include system requirements analysis, instruction, implementing software agents, and a workbench for relating cognitive and social theories of human behavior. (C) 1998 Academic Press.