How to Model Inter-Organisational Networks to Enable Dynamic Analyses via Simulations

As sociological research has shown, inter-organisational networks - as a flexible form of organisation addressing today's market demands - mainly rely on trust to coordinate their interactions and need to be managed in a continuous process. Any analysis that intends to support such networks thus has to address dynamic aspects. In this paper, we discuss a necessary pre-step when simulation is used as the foundational analysis approach: the modelling of the network. We build on earlier work that established a methodology and a simulation environment but refine it in clarifying how to actually model the essential parts of an inter-organisational network under investigation. The analysis of the key ingredients suggests to separate three concerns: business, organisation, and actor modelling. We discuss how these aspects are captured in the formalisms that we proposed in our methodology. Finally, we have a short look at their integration and the mapping into simulations.