BEN: An Architecture for the Behavior of Social Agents

Over the last few years, the use of agent-based simulations to study social systems has spread to many domains (e.g., geography, ecology, sociology, economy). These simulations aim to reproduce real life situations involving human beings and thus need to integrate complex agents to match the behavior of the simulated people. Therefore, notions such as cognition, emotions, personality, social relationships or norms have to be taken into account, but there is currently no agent architecture that could incorporate all these features and be used by the majority of modelers, including those with low levels of skills in programming. In this paper, the BEN (Behavior with Emotions and Norms) architecture is introduced to tackle this issue. It is a modular architecture based on the BDI model of cognition and featuring modules to add emotions, emotional contagion, personality, social relationships and norms to agent behavior. This architecture is integrated into the GAMA simulation platform. An application of BEN to the simulation of the evacuation of a nightclub on fire is presented and shows the complexity of behaviors that may be developed with this architecture to create credible and expressive simulations.