Modelling Motivational Behaviour In Intelligent Agents In Virtual Worlds

The MAS group at the DFKI is developing ar-chitectures for animated agents in virtual worlds. Within the tradition of AI there are many techniques that can be used to model the cognitive abilities of such characters, in particular the ability to learn from the environment and plan actions that lead to a well deened goal. Some have argued, however, that these techniques are too complex Reilly, 1996], that simpler techniques with a ex-ible control structure are the key to making characters believable. We argue here that much of the advantages of intelligent agent architectures can be preserved, if we complement them with resource-bounded, motivational constructs.