1. Requirements for a General Agent Architecture for Agent-Based Simulation Environments
Paul Scerri and Nancy Reed
Department of Computer and Information Science
Linköpings Universitet, S , Linköping, Sweden

2. Outline Domain of interest is simulation environments
We argue that agent architectures need to be evaluated by a range of engineering criteria
Discuss some suggested criteria

3. Simulation Environments
Highly complex, real-time training and testing simulation environments
Agents used in place of humans
Examples
Air-combat simulation
Disaster management
RoboCup simulated soccer

4. Agent Architectures
Define an agent architecture as a framework for developing agents
e.g. PRS, Subsumption, Soar
Wide range of fundamentally different architectures used in the domain
Agents built using many different architectures capable performing most of the tasks required of agents in the domain

5. Criticism of Current Architecture Descriptions
Literature focuses evaluation on capabilities of agents
From the perspective of someone wanting to use agents rather than just build them it is equally important to know how difficult it was to build the agents
Evaluation needs to be done as to how difficult it is to build agents with the required behavior

6. Engineering Considerations for Architecture Selection
Accessibility
Conciseness
Reuse
Generality
Software Engineering
Hardware Usage
Learning

7. Accessibility
How easy is it for non-agent experts to create agents with the architecture?
How much does a designer need to understand about the architecture in order to create useful agents?
Agent “gurus”
only
Any Tom, Dick
or Mary

8. Conciseness
How much programming is required to create agents capable of performing different tasks?
Verbose
Succinct

9. Reuse
How easy is it to reuse parts of one specification in another specification
All similar
behavior
None

10. Generality For what range of applications is the architecture useful?
One specific
application only
General
intelligence

11. Software Engineering
Does the architecture support a software engineering methodology?
How modular is the agent specification?
Built in
development
methodology
Ad hoc
hacking

12. Debugging
How difficult is it to trace from inappropriate agent behavior to incorrect specification elements?
Is there any system support for debugging?
Errors simple
to locate and
fix
Impossible to
locate errors

13. Hardware Usage What are the computational requirements for the agents?
Requires
Mainframe
1000s of agents
on a PC

14. Learning Does the architecture provide support for machine learning?
Abstract
unsupervised
learning
Does not
learn

15. Summary Most capabilities required of agents can be achieved
Little emphasis is placed on how difficult it is for a programmer, or user, to develop agents to perform certain tasks
We have proposed criteria by which we believe agent architectures should be evaluated in order for non-agent experts to find the architecture they need