Interactive simulation environments constitute one of today's promising emerging technologies, with applications in areas such as education, manufacturing, entertainment, and training. These environments are also rich domains for building and investigating intelligent automated agents, with requirements for the integration of a variety of agent capabilities but without the costs and demands of low-level perceptual processing or robotic control.Our project is aimed at developing humanlike, intelligent agents that can interact with each other, as well as with humans, in such virtual environments. Our current target is intelligent automated pilots for battlefield-simulation environments. These dynamic, interactive, multiagent environments pose interesting challenges for research on specialized agent capabilities as well as on the integration of these capabilities in the development of ''complete'' pilot agents. We are addressing these challenges through development of a pilot agent, called TacAir-Soar, within the Soar architecture.This article provides an overview of this domain and project by analyzing the challenges that automated pilots face in battlefield simulations, describing how TacAir-Soar is successfully able to address many of them-TacAir-Soar pilots have already successfully participated in constrained air-combat simulations against expert human pilots-and discussing the issues involved in resolving the remaining research challenges.

time, flexibly use a small amount of tactical Abstract knowledge about two classes of one-versusThis article reports on recent progress one (1-v-1) Beyond Visual Range (BVR) in the development of TacAir-Soar, an tactical air scenarios. In the non-jinking intelligent automated agent for tactical air bogey scenarios, one plane (the non-jinking simulation. This includes progress in bogey) is unarmed and maintains a straightexpanding the agent’s coverage of the and-level flight path. The other plane is tactical air domain, progress in enhancing armed with long-range radar-guided, the quality of the agent’s behavior, and medium-range radar-guided, and short-range progress in building an infrastructure for infrared-guided missiles. Its task is to set up research and development in this area. for a sequence of missile shots, at