Supervision : Amal EL FALLAH SEGHROUCHNI
Co-supervision : CORRUBLE Vincent, DONNART Jean-Yves

A Hybrid and Flexible Agent Architecture for Urban Simulations: Behavior Composition and Anticipation issues

This thesis deals about human behaviors simulation in an urban context. We focus on the behavior believability (as judged as external observers). That is why our agent have some anticipatory skills, which allow them to use predictions about their near future. Our architecture is a hybrid one, which is very innovative because of its functioning with « high-level modules », which are seen as black-box from the rest of the architecture. Their number and intern modeling are completely free. This makes our architecture very modular and generic, and it is important because the urban simulation domain has many different applications (urbanism, video games, security, etc.), with different constraints. However, this genericity brings another problem, which is the integration of several heterogeneous behavior into the same decisional process. This issue is addressed thanks to a behavior composition mechanism. To conclude, we ensure the scaling up of our architecture with the creation of several levels of detail in the agents modeling.

Phd defence : 04/29/2014

Jury members :

Marc Cavazza, Teesside University (UK) [Rapporteur]
Geber Ramalho, Universidade Federal do Pernambuco (Brésil) [Rapporteur]
Domitile Lourdeaux, Université de Technologie de Compiègne
Nicolas Bredèche, Université Pierre et Marie Curie
Amal El Fallah Seghrouchni, UPMC
Vincent Corruble, UPMC
Jean-Yves Donnart, THALES T&S
Etienne de Sevin, MASA Group

2012-2014 Publications

• 2014
  • Q. Reynaud : “Architecture cognitive d’agents situés”, thesis, phd defence 04/29/2014, supervision El fallah seghrouchni, Amal, co-supervision : Corruble, Vincent, Donnart, Jean-Yves (2014)
  • Q. Reynaud, J.‑Y. Donnart, V. Corruble : “Evaluating the impact of anticipation on the efficiency and believability of virtual agents”, Intelligent Virtual Agents, Boston, MA, United States, (Springer) (2014)
  • Q. Reynaud, J.‑Y. Donnart, V. Corruble : “Evaluating the Believability of Virtual Agents with Anticipatory Abilities”, Proceedings of the 13^th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS 2014), Paris, France (2014)
• 2013
  • Q. Reynaud, V. Corruble : “Un mécanisme de composition de comportements pour agents virtuels”, 21^es Journées Francophones des Systèmes Multi-Agents, Lille, France (2013)
• 2012
  • Q. Reynaud, E. De Sevin, J.‑Y. Donnart, V. Corruble : “A cognitive module in a decision-making architecture for agents in urban simulations”, Cognitive Agents for Virtual Environments, vol. 7764, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Valencia, Spain, pp. 120-133, (Springer) (2012)
  • E. De Sevin, Q. Reynaud, V. Corruble : “FlexMex: Flexible Multi-Expert Meta-Architecture for Virtual Agents”, First Annual Conference on Advances in Cognitive Systems, Palo Alto, California, United States (2012)