ALVW: an alife behaviour modelling system

PurposeSeeks to present here a system that enables the user to design artificial worlds and inhabitants within these worlds.Design/methodology/approachAn alife (artificial life) approach is used in order to obtain complex behaviour as the emergence of a set of basic behaviours which interact within the environment and between them. Through the paper, the reader will find the necessary details to understand the architecture and the computational model of the system, as well as the way to use it in a specific application: modelling behaviour for synthetic cockroaches within his own environment.FindingsA detailed example is given of how this application can be used in simulating ecological environments, where the user can design an inhabited ecosystem and observe (tuning it if necessary) the evolution of the artificial ecosystem. Also outlined is another example of how this research system can be coupled with a commercial 3D computer animation software; the goal in this case is to produce automatically a script for a computer animation, reflecting what is happening in the artificial world.Research limitations/implicationsThe paper describes a technical research system that allows the user to design reactive behaviour modelling for cockroaches. The next natural step is to make a cognitive behaviour modelling and to extend it to other animals.Practical implicationsFusion between research systems and commercial packages (in this case, for example, behaviour modelling and 3D computer animation systems) can be an important issue.Originality/valueThe main interests of the presented system face compared with the existing ones are the coordinated use of several alife techniques, the integral approach (design of both the environment and the inhabitants), a computationally reasonable implementation of the system as an artificial ecosystem, and the possibility of using the results of such a research system as an input for a commercial 3D software in order to obtain 3D realistic computer animations.