Design of a Decision Maker Agent for a Distributed Role Playing Game – Experience of the SimParc Project

This paper addresses an ongoing experience in the design of an artificial agent taking decisions in a role playing game populated by human agents and by artificial agents. At first, we will present the context, an ongoing research project aimed at computer-based support for participatory management of protected areas (and more specifically national parks) in order to promote biodiversity conservation and social inclusion. Our applicative objective is, through a distributed role-playing game, to help various stakeholders (e.g., environmentalist, tourism operator) to collectively understand conflict dynamics for natural resources management and to explore negotiation management strategies for the management of parks. Our approach includes support for negotiation among players and insertion of various types of artificial agents (decision making agent, virtual players, assistant agents). In this paper, we will focus on the architecture of the decision making agent playing the role of the park manager, the rationales for its decision, and how it takes into account the preferences/votes from the stakeholders.