Supporting flexible autonomy in a simulation environment for intelligent agent designs

Intelligent agents designed to perform in the real world should, by definition, be tested and evaluated in such a world. However, this is impossible in many situations; a lack of resources may rule out construction of a complete robotic environment, for example, or the desired domain may be physically inaccessible for testing. In such situations, the use of a situation system is needed. Gensim, a generic simulation system for intelligent agents is described here. Rather than providing a single, parameterized domain, Gensim provides a collection of facilities allowing users to design complete environments for examining and testing intelligent agents. The system also provides direct low-level support for implementing sets of agents that display flexible autonomy: the ability to solve problems by varying the degree of autonomy of single agents in a multiagent system