A programming environment for behavioral animation

Behavioral models offer the ability to simulate autonomous agents like organisms and living beings. Psychological studies have showed that the human behavior can be described by a perception-decision-action loop, in which the decisional process should integrate several programming paradigms such as real-time, concurrency, and hierarchy. Building such systems for interactive simulation requires the de-sign of a reactive system treating flows of data to and from the environment, and involving task control and preemption. Since a complete mental model based on vision and image processing cannot be con-structed in real time using purely geometrical information, higher levels of information are needed in a model of the virtual environment. For example, the autonomous actors of a virtual world would exploit the knowledge of the environment topology to navigate through it. Accordingly, in this paper we present our programminbg environment for real-time behavioral animation which is composed of a general an-imation and simulation platform, a behavioral modelling language, a scenario authoring tool and a city modeler which enables to produce complex urban informed environments.