A method for developing agent-based models of socio-technical systems
Agent-based modeling is one of the popular tools for analyzing complex socio-technical systems. Because of the complex nature of such systems a systematic methodology is required to guide the modeling process. By studying the existing methodologies in MAS we distinguished four major differences between MAS and ABM regarding goals, system scale and diversity, level of system understanding and verification and validation concerns. In this paper we take these differences into account and based on more than 25 case studies, we present a methodological framework for developing agent-based models that consists of five general iterative phases. These phases namely: system analysis, model design, detailed design, implementation and evaluation further consists of smaller step that are also addressed in this paper. This methodology provides a tool independent template while respecting the specific requirements for ABM.
This paper proposes a multi-modal complex motion authoring tool for creating robot contents. The proposed tool is user-friendly and allows general users without much knowledge about robots, including children, women and the elderly, to easily edit and modify robot contents. Furthermore, the tool uses multi-modal data including graphic motion, voice and music to simulate user-created robot contents in the 3D virtual environment. This allows the user to not only view the authoring process in real time but also transmit the final authored contents to control the robot. The validity of the proposed tool was examined based on simulations using the authored multi-modal complex motion robot contents as well as experiments of actual robot motions.