Urging desire: motivational mechanisms for intelligent agents with minds of their own

In this article, we examine ways to organize an intelligent autonomous agent's goal system to simulate the behavior of a human worker in an enterprise modelling system called goal orientated multi-agent simulation environment (GOMASE). In GOMASE, an agent is supplied with a goal hierarchy, activity digraph, and a motivational mechanism in an attempt to simulate the goal's activation and attempted satisfaction. The attractiveness of this approach is that all the goals possessed by the agent are related via the ultimate life goals (i.e., self-preservation and species preservation). By using GOMASE to model enterprises, the enterprise modeller can gain an insight into the complex behavior of human workers and how they set, prioritize, and execute their goals. In this article, we also provide several sample runs of our system, with a brief explanation on the agent's behaviors.