This thesis reports on a study that examined customer accounting (CA) in Australian companies. The broad aims of the thesis are to develop an understanding of the organisational role played by CA practice and the role accounting plays in providing information about a firm's customer base. Three empirical phases have been undertaken in the study. The first phase involved exploratory interviews with accountants and marketers from a number of Australian firms. The second phase comprised an in-depth case study that involved the development of a segmental customer profitability analysis in a major Australian telecommunications company. The third empirical phase involved the administration of a survey questionnaire to chief accountants and marketing managers from a number of large Australian companies. A number of significant findings are reported and include: (1) A level of CA practice has been observed that is reasonably in line with what was anticipated based on the minimal previous academic interest in this area. (2) There appears to be a potential for further CA development in Australian companies. (3) The interview findings identified 'short-term tactical decisions' and 'focus attention on maximising customer value' as the two most important organisational roles CA may play. (4) CA systems were found to provide important information for marketing resource allocation decisions, customer retention decisions, customer service management decisions and customer pricing decisions. (5) The main barriers to CA implementation identified during the segmental CPA case study and exploratory interviews concerned information technology and data acquisition problems. This finding was supported by the results of the survey questionnaire phase of the study where in addition to these two barriers, 'other competing organisational priorities' was rated highly as an impediment to CA system development. (6) Some support was found for the proposed relationships between CA and the contingent factors of company size, customisation, and organisational structure. (7) Limited support was found for the proposed positive association between CA systems and competition intensity and marketing orientation. (8) No support was found for the proposed relationships between perceived environmental uncertainty, organisational strategy, organisational performance and CA systems. (9) Customisation was the only contingent factor found to have a significant impact upon the potential of CA to aid management.

Simulation has been used to model combat for a long time. Recently, it has been accepted that combat is a complex adaptive system (CAS). Multi-agent systems (MAS) are also considered as a powerful modelling and development environment to simulate combat. Agent-based distillations (ABD) - proposed by the US Marine Corp - are a type of MAS used mainly by the military for exploring large scenario spaces. ABDs that facilitated the analysis and understanding of combat include: ISAAC, EINSTein, MANA, CROCADILE and BactoWars. With new concepts such as networked forces, previous ABDs can implicitly simulate a networked force. However, the architectures of these systems limit the potential advantages gained from the use of networks. In this thesis, a novel network centric multi-agent architecture (NCMAA) is pro-posed, based purely on network theory and CAS. In NCMAA, each relationship and interaction is modelled as a network, with the entities or agents as the nodes. NCMAA offers the following advantages: 1. An explicit model of interactions/relationships: it facilitates the analysis of the role of interactions/relationships in simulations; 2. A mechanism to capture the interaction or influence between networks; 3. A formal real-time reasoning framework at the network level in ABDs: it interprets the emergent behaviours online. For a long time, it has been believed that it is hard in CAS to reason about emerging phenomena. In this thesis, I show that despite being almost impossible to reason about the behaviour of the system by looking at the components alone because of high nonlinearity, it is possible to reason about emerging phenomena by looking at the network level. This is undertaken through analysing network dynamics, where I provide an English-like reasoning log to explain the simulation. Two implementations of a new land-combat system called the Warfare Intelligent System for Dynamic Optimization of Missions (WISDOM) are presented. WISDOM-I is built based on the same principles as those in existing ABDs while WISDOM-II is built based on NCMAA. The unique features of WISDOM-II include: 1. A real-time network analysis toolbox: it captures patterns while interaction is evolving during the simulation; 2. Flexible C3 (command, control and communication) models; I 3. Integration of tactics with strategies: the tactical decisions are guided by the strategic planning; 4. A model of recovery: it allows users to study the role of recovery capability and resources; 5. Real-time visualization of all possible information: it allows users to intervene during the simulation to steer it differently in human-in-the-loop simulations. A comparison between the fitness landscapes of WISDOM-I and II reveals similarities and differences, which emphasise the importance and role of the networked architecture and the addition of strategic planning. Lastly but not least, WISDOM-II is used in an experiment with two setups, with and without strategic planning in different urban terrains. When the strategic planning was removed, conclusions were similar to traditional ABDs but were very different when the system ran with strategic planning. As such, I show that results obtained from traditional ABDs - where rational group planning is not considered - can be misleading. Finally, the thesis tests and demonstrates the role of communication in urban ter-rains. As future warfighting concepts tend to focus on asymmetric warfare in urban environments, it was vital to test the role of networked forces in these environments. I demonstrate that there is a phase transition in a number of situations where highly dense urban terrains may lead to similar outcomes as open terrains, while medium to light dense urban terrains have different dynamics