The AEP Toolkit for Agent Design and Simulation

The design of artificial agents that are meant to model behavioral, cognitive, economic or social structures asks for tools that aid in layout and implementation of agent architectures. To implement agents based on Dörner’s Psi theory of emotion and cognition, our group has introduced a toolkit that assists in designing modular architectures, as well as representational structures, such as semantic networks, control scripts and connectionist structures by means of a graphical editor. At the same time, the framework supports the inclusion of functionality written in a native programming language. This paper gives an overview over the implementation of agents according to Dörner’s theory, and while it also aims at giving an insight into the functioning of these agents (which we call “MicroPsi” agents), its main purpose is the explanation of the use of the toolkit.