Critical Incident Management: an Empirically Derived Computational Model

The main purpose of this paper is to demonstrate an empirical approach to social simulation. The systems and the behaviour of middle-level managers of a real company are modelled. The managers' cognition is represented by problem space architectures drawn from cognitive science and an endorsements mechanism adapted from the literature on conflict resolution in rulebased systems. Both aspects of the representation of cognition are based on information provided by domain experts. Qualitative and numerical results accord with the views of domain experts.