Building cognitively rich agents using the SIM_Agent toolkit

Synthetic agents with varying degrees of intelligence and autonomy are being designed in many research laboratories. The motivations include military training simulations, games and entertainments, educational software, digital personal assistants, software agents managing Internet transactions or purely scientific curiosity. Different approaches are being explored, including, at one extreme, research on the interactions between agents, and at the other extreme research on processes within agents. The first approach focuses on forms of communication, requirements for consistent collaboration, planning of coordinated behaviours to achieve collaborative goals, extensions to logics of action and belief for multiple agents, and types of emergent phenomena when many agents interact, for instance taking routing decisions on a telecommunications network. The second approach focuses on the internal architecture of individual agents required for social interaction, collaborative behaviours, complex decision making, learning, and emergent phenomena within complex agents. Agents with complex internal structure may, for example, combine perception, motive generation, planning, plan execution, execution monitoring, and even emotional reactions.