Extending Unbounded Systems Thinking with agent-oriented modeling: conceptualizing a multiple perspective decision-making support system

Organizations today face complex decision-making environments in which multiple perspectives must be considered. Mitroff and Linstone [The Unbounded Mind: Breaking the Chains of Traditional Business Thinking (1993) Oxford University Press, New York] developed Unbounded Systems Thinking (UST), of which multiple perspectives are an integral part. They suggest that, while the theory of applying multiple perspectives to decision-making and knowledge creation is sound and well researched, the implementation of multiple perspectives is difficult. It is maintained here that agent-oriented modeling can be used to design a system supporting multiple perspectives and to extend UST. This paper applies the Belief-Desire-Intention (BDI) model of agents to UST to demonstrate the use of agent-oriented modeling to facilitate multiple perspective decision support.