AGENT-BASED COMPUTER-GENERATED-FORCES' BEHAVIOUR IMPROVEMENT

This paper captures the initial stages of a research project into improving the decision making performance of simulated entities in Computer Generated Forces (CGF) software applications. To date, the decisions made by Artificial Intelligence (AI)-enhanced synthetic entities have demonstrated a limited ability to react to changes in the synthetic environment, to use sensor data as effectively as a human operator, or in general to impact the synthetic environment in a comparable manner to a human operator. This paper presents a survey of AI in both the video gaming industry and academic circles leading to the proposal of a new agent architecture that combines a traditional agent architecture with a psychological framework (Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs) leading to the specification of a "Needs-based" agent. This paper also captures the initial design decisions on the construction of a prototype and identifies candidate technologies to advance the research to the next phase. It is proposed that by combining the cognitive elements of the psychological framework with the behavioural emphasis of agents, synthetic entities in military and non-military simulations can produce better decisions and therefore exhibit more realistic behaviour which by ricochet will require less human intervention in simulation executions.