ALVW: an alife behaviour modelling system

Purpose – Seeks to present here a system that enables the user to design artificial worlds and inhabitants within these worlds.Design/methodology/approach – An alife (artificial life) approach is used in order to obtain complex behaviour as the emergence of a set of basic behaviours which interact within the environment and between them. Through the paper, the reader will find the necessary details to understand the architecture and the computational model of the system, as well as the way to use it in a specific application: modelling behaviour for synthetic cockroaches within his own environment.Findings – A detailed example is given of how this application can be used in simulating ecological environments, where the user can design an inhabited ecosystem and observe (tuning it if necessary) the evolution of the artificial ecosystem. Also outlined is another example of how this research system can be coupled with a commercial 3D computer animation software; the goal in this case is to produce automatica...