Design of Modular Generation of Human Behaviour in a Collaborative Context

Tristan de Blauwe, Domitile Lourdeaux, Nicolas Sabouret

Abstract: Training people for facing dangerous situations has always been expensive and difficult or dangerous to organize. New approaches use virtual environments and simulation in which the role of collaborative people is played by cognitive agents, which allows making training sessions when they were not previously possible, or else decreasing their cost. Two problems arise: firstly, it is necessary to simulate teams, composed of virtual agents and the learner, interacting in a collaborative context. Secondly, we need to support the definition of a variety of explainable and professional behaviours (i.e. representative of the expected behaviours of an expert in a given profession). It is extremely complex and time consuming. To facilitate the design of tools allowing to build adequate agents model, we propose a meta-model of human behavior simulation. The originality of this meta-model is to make the cognitive models, used for explainability, and the agent model completely independent, to avoid repeated implementations of various behaviours. We show how task selection works on a simple agent model, by means of a graph of influences and preferences. This means has the advantage of being intelligible by its visual nature and of facilitating the addition of new behaviours impacting on the selection. A preliminary evaluation has shown that human users perceive the variability of behaviour and that the provided explanations are relevant.