VISTA: A Generic Toolkit for Visualizing Agent Behavior

In order for agent-based technologies to play an effective role in simulation and trainingsynthetic force applications, they must carry outgenerate realistic and believable behaviors that are virtually indistinguishable from what a human actor might do under the same circumstances. However, systems that are capable of such complex behavior necessarily include complex internal representations and The complicated nature of agent-based systems and of their interactions with their environment.s, however, often These complexities makes it difficult to examine and evaluate an agent's internal reasoning processes without extensive knowledge of the technical details of the agent's implementation. The difficulty of conveying an agent's internal reasoning processes to non-technical users and, consequently, of demonstrating the accuracy of the resulting behaviors is a large hurdle in the acceptance of agentbased systems. To address this challenge, we have developed the Visualization Toolkit for Agents (VISTA), which can be used to build visualization tools that provide insight into an agent's internal reasoning processes. Such tools allow agent developers, subject-matter experts, and training supervisors to verify the correctness of an agent's behavior without delving into the technical details of its implementation. VISTA is a generic infrastructure that tries to makes as few commitments as possible to a particular problem domain or agent architecture. VISTA aims to make it easy for agent developers to construct visualization tools for their particular agent technology. In this paper we describe VISTA and illustrate its usefulness by presenting the Situation Awareness Panel (SAP), a particular instantiation of the VISTA framework, that we used to examine the behavior of Soar agents operating in the tactical air combat domain.