Action Selection and Individuation in Agent Based Modelling
Joanna J. Bryson, David L. Sallach, Charles M. Macal · 2003
This paper is a tutorial on action selection for Agent-Based Mod-elling (ABM). Having a clear idea of how you are organizing your agent’s intelligence will make your code cleaner and easier to main-tain, and your models easier to communicate to others. This paper describes four means of orgainizing agent action selection in increas-ing order of complexity These are: environmental determinism, finite state machines, basic reactive plans, and Parallel-rooted, Ordered, Slip-stack Hierarchical (POSH) reactive plans. Modellers should use the simplest mechanism possible — this paper describes the contexts in which more complicated mechanisms may be required, as well as sug-gesting coding and commenting schemes for all four systems. This paper also addresses the issue of Individuated Agent-Based Modelling (IABM), where individual agents display different behav-ior. It gives examples of existing IABM systems and describes how these can be moved into more mainstream ABM simulators via two relatively simple mechanisms: either exploiting individual local vari-ables or by specifying different priorities within the action selection mechanism. This allows individual agents to vary in their behavior while sharing the vast majority of their code. 1