SimCog - Simulation of Cognitive Agents

SIMCOG Project

SIMCOG (Simulation of Cognitive Agents) is a research project that aims to develop a generic platform for multi-agent based simulation of cognitive agents. It has started in 2001 at the Dept. of Informatics, University of Lisbon, and at the Intelligent Techniques Laboratory, University of São Paulo. The project has two independent and cross-fertilizable phases. The first one is to define a reference model for the requirements specification of an ideal type agent-based simulation platform. In this phase we adopt two independent approaches: (i) we make a comparative analysis between different platforms that are presently available to the research community; (ii) we prospect and explore requirements with researchers in the field. The second phase is the specification, design and implementation of an agent-based simulation platform complying with a subset of these requirements, with special focus on the simulation of cognitive agents. To this end we have specified a multi-agent meta-model according to an organisation-centered approach, in order to simulate multi-agent societies. The meta-model is called MOSCA (Meta Organisation for Simulation of Cognitive Agents). The term "meta" is used because the SimCog platform infrastructure is based on a MAS, which constructs and controls the simulated MAS. MOSCA is guided by the following general principles:
-	Provide an infrastructure to observe and intervene on both behavioural and cognitive events in a simulation. In order to observe possible emergent structures playing causal roles in the simulation, we formally separate the observation of the agent's behavioural (external) and cognitve (internal) events. This can be done at the individual or aggregate levels.
-	Provide ontologies for knowledge sharing, reuse, simulation modelling and interoperability of simulations.