Businesses will perform two actions in this model: query customers and collect customer responses to update their position and item price.
Query customers → Businesses will send their neighbors every possible position and item_price change combination.
[ [-1, 0], [0, 0], [1, 0], [0, -1], [0, 1] ]item_price + 1, item_price, item_price - 1Collect customer responses → Businesses will collect and store all the customer responses to determine the position and item_price combination with the largest profit
This action can be split into three separate functions within business.js: send_message, price_messaging, movement_messaging.
Let’s start with sending the message. send_message() will add messages to state.messages with a neighbor agent_id, position, item_price, and rgb. Add this function to business.js.
const send_message = (agent_id, position, price) => {
state.addMessage(agent_id, "business_movement", {
position,
price,
rgb: state.rgb,
});
};
rgb is sent so we can visually see which business a customer chooses to shop
at
The next step is to create the price_messaging() function. This function will receive the neighbor's agent_id and position change, iterate through the possible item_price values, and call send_message to notify all possible neighbors.
const price_messaging = (agent_id, position) => {
const item_price = state.item_price;
send_message(agent_id, position, item_price);
send_message(agent_id, position, item_price + 1);
if (item_price > 1) {
send_message(agent_id, position, item_price - 1);
}
};
Notice here how we check if the item_price is greater than 1. This is important as we don’t want the item_price to drop below 0.
The final function we are going to create for querying Customers is movement messaging; however, since this will be our top level function we are going to name it query_customers(). In this function, business agents are going to iterate through their Customer neighbors and send them all possible position and item_price change combinations.
const query_customers = (neighbors, state_position) => {
const possible_movement = [
[-1, 0],
[0, 0],
[1, 0],
[0, -1],
[0, 1],
];
neighbors
.filter((n) => n.behaviors.includes("customer.js"))
.forEach((n) => {
possible_movement.forEach((movement) => {
const new_position = [
state_position[0] + movement[0],
state_position[1] + movement[1],
0,
];
price_messaging(n.agent_id, new_position);
});
});
};
You can test your new code by placing the following snippet underneath your function declarations and looking at the Raw Output view tab.
query_customers(context.neighbors(), state.position);
Find the messages field for a Business agent and it should be filled with “business_movement” type messages.
Since Business agents are sending around 100 (neighbors) x 6 (positions) x 3 (prices) messages at one time, we don’t want this to occur every time step. We'll add a counter to ensure it happens at the rate we want.
business.js. (You want the counter to increment before business.js is called)init.json give your Business agents three more variables:In the business.js behavior, wrap the query_customers() call in the following if statement:
if (state.counter === 0) {
query_customers(context.neighbors(), state.position);
}
The behavior Counter adds a counter variable to every business agent that will automatically increment at each time step. This ensures that query_customers() is only called every 3 time steps.
const behavior = (state, context) => {
const send_message = (agent_id, position, price) => {
state.addMessage(agent_id, "business_movement", {
position,
price,
rgb: state.rgb,
});
};
const price_messaging = (agent_id, position) => {
const item_price = state.item_price;
send_message(agent_id, position, item_price);
send_message(agent_id, position, item_price + 1);
if (item_price > 1) {
send_message(agent_id, position, item_price - 1);
}
};
const query_customers = (neighbors, state_position) => {
const possible_movement = [
[-1, 0],
[0, 0],
[1, 0],
[0, -1],
[0, 1],
];
neighbors
.filter((n) => n.behaviors.includes("customer.js"))
.forEach((n) => {
possible_movement.forEach((movement) => {
const new_position = [
state_position[0] + movement[0],
state_position[1] + movement[1],
];
price_messaging(n.agent_id, new_position);
});
});
};
if (state.counter === 0) {
query_customers(context.neighbors(), state.position);
}
};
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