Annual report 2013, Synthetic actors

This report describes the work that was carried out within the project Synthetic actors (FoT nr 922:01.03) in 2013. The project has since the requirements analysis that was performed in collaboration with the Swedish ground combat school in 2009 developed a prototype, POPSIM, which is a tool targeting the modeling and simulation of human populations, on an individual level-of-abstraction, within synthetic city environments. The development of POPSIM has been the main activity of 2013. Some of the highlights in this year's work has been: the ability to simulate opinions within the population; path-planning for pedestrians; visualization of situational awareness with respect to the exercise leader and the trainee; and finally, a description and an implementation of a scenario targeting the training of a real-world military staff and its capability to trade-off information acquisition vs. risk within the urban warfare domain. Besides the development of POPSIM, the project has:  in collaboration with the Swedish anti-aircraft regiment (LV6) and the Swedish air force combat simulation centre (FLSC) discussed future needs and requirements of behavior models representing anti-aircraft systems,  established contact and planned for future collaboration with international scientists within the research fields data-driven behavior modeling and learning/adaptive agents. The plan for next year, which is the project's final year, is to continue improving and developing the POPSIM prototype and to perform an exercise to evaluate and to identify shortcomings with respect to the tool and its models.