A new BDI architecture to formalize cognitive agent behaviors into simulations

Nowadays, agent-based modeling is more and more used to study complex socio-ecological systems. These last years have also seen the development of several agent-based simulation platforms. These platforms allow modelers to easily and quickly develop models with simple agents. However, socioecological systems need agents able to make decisions in order to represent human beings and the design of such complex agents is still an open issue: even with these platforms, designing agents able to make complex reasoning is a difficult task, in particular for modelers that have no programming skill. In order to answer the modeler needs concerning complex agent design, we propose a new agent architecture based on the BDI paradigm and integrated into a simulation platform (GAMA). This paradigm allows designing expressive and realistic agents, yet, it is rarely used in simulation context. A reason is that most agent architectures based on the BDI paradigm are complex to understand and to use by non-computer-scientists. Our agent architecture answers this problem by allowing modelers to define complex cognitive agents in a simple way. An application of our architecture on a model concerning forest fire and firefighter helicopters is presented.