An Immersion into a Multi-agent Store Simulation

FORMAT-STORE1 is a Serious Game (SG) in 3d designed in collaboration with the game studio Idées-3Com2 and the business school ENACO3, aimed at training undergraduate students to the management of a convenience store and customer relationship. In FORMAT-STORE, the learner is immersed in a virtual replica of a store populated by artificial customers, so as to practice daily activities of a salesperson. Immersive SG raise specific issues as explained in [3]. An Interaction-Oriented approach such as IODA [2] offers a particularly convenient way to address the multiple problems of such a SG simultaneously. Basically, the IODA approach is based upon three key ideas [2]: 1) each relevant entity should be represented by an agent, 2) each behavior should be written as an abstract interaction, which is roughly a condition/action rule that can occur between a source agent (which performs the interaction) and a target agent (which undergoes it), and 3) the simulation model is described by the assignation of interactions to source and target agent families, which is achieved inside the interaction matrix (cf. fig. 1). This allows for a generic (i.e. domain-independent) engine to run the simulation. As a consequence, all the entities in the virtual store are in fact represented by agents. Therefore, every entity in the store (items, information signs, the checkout, etc.) is likely to play an active role in the simulation, offering an original implementation of the affordances concept [1]. Each agent will consider every interaction in