How Artificial Intelligent Agents Do Shopping in a Virtual Mall: A 'Believable' and 'Usable' Multiagent-Based Simulation of Customers' Shopping Behavior in a Mall

Our literature review revealed that several applications successfully simulate certain kinds of human behaviors in spatial environments, but they have some limitations related to the ‘believability' and the ‘usability' of the simulations. This paper aims to present a set of requirements for multiagentbased simulations in terms of ‘believability' and ‘usability'. It also presents how these requirements have been put into use to develop a multiagent-based simulation prototype of customers' shopping behavior in a mall. Using software agents equipped with spatial and cognitive capabilities, this prototype can be considered sufficiently ‘believable' and ‘usable' for end-users, mainly mall managers in our case. We show how shopping behavior simulator can support the decision-making process with respect to the spatial configuration of the shopping mall.

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