Agent-based modeling on technological innovation as an evolutionary process

This paper describes a multi-agent model built to simulate the process of technological innovation, based on the widely accepted theory that technological innovation can be seen as an evolutionary process. The actors in the simulation include producers and a large number of consumers. Every producer will produce several types of products at each step. Each product is composed of several design parameters and several performance parameters (fitness components). Kauffman's famous NK model is used to deal with the mapping from a design parameter space (DPS) to a performance parameter space (PPS). In addition to the constructional selection, which can be illustrated by the NK model, we added environmental selection into the simulation and explored technological innovation as the result of the interaction between these two kinds of selection. (c) 2004 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.