AFS and HAC: Domain-General Agent Simulation and Control
Marc S. Atkin, David L. Westbrook, Paul R. Cohen, Gregory D. Jorstad · 1998
We present two systems for simulating and designing agents, respectively. The first, the Abstract Force Simulator (AFS), is a domain-general simulator of agents applying forces; many domains can be characterized in this way. The second, Hierarchical Agent Control (HAC), is a general toolkit for designing an action hierarchy. It supports action abstraction, a multilevel computational architecture, sensor integration, and planning. It is particularly well suited to controlling large numbers of agents in dynamic environments. Together, AFS and HAC provide a very general framework for designing and testing agents. Introduction We have set ourselves the goal of constructing a domaingeneral agent development toolkit. Regardless of the domain, agent designers must face the same kinds of problems: processing sensor information, reacting to a changing environment in a timely manner, integrating reactive and cognitive processes to achieve an abstract goal, interleaving planning and execution, ...