Using Artificial Team Members for Military Team Training in Virtual Environments

Developing good team skills usually involves exercises with all team members playing their role. This approach is costly and has organizational and educational drawbacks. For the Netherlands army, we developed a more efficient and flexible approach by setting training in virtual environments, and using intelligent software agents to play the role of team members. We developed a general framework for developing agents that, in a controlled fashion, execute the behavior that enables the human player (i.e., trainee) to effectively learn team skills. The framework is tested by developing and implementing various types of team agents in Virtual Battle Space 2 (VBS2).