Modeling Human Behavior for Software Engineering Simulation Games

Simulation games are a well-known concept for teaching in a practical way. Especially for project management training, simulation games are helpful. Students can try out different management strategies and gain experience without endangering real projects. To provide a good learning environment, it is important to simulate the employees managed by the player as realistically as possible. However, existing approaches only use simple models to simulate human behavior, missing psychological aspects like motivation and interpersonal interaction, and therefore are not detailed enough for leadership and project management training. We present a new decision-making model based on findings of psychology, which can be used for simulating a more realistic human behavior. We use heuristics for calculating the motivational force of all potential actions an employee has, in order to decide which he will choose. This calculation is not only based on the project's state and schedule, but also on emotional factors like the preferences and aversions of the employee. Within our approach, we implemented a decision-making model, which is not limited to our game concept and can also be adapted for other simulation games.