Behavior Trees - Scalability and Industry Applications

Scalability and Industry Applications

The first industry trials to test the feasibility of the method and refine its capability were conducted in 2002. Over the last three years a number of systematic industry trials on large-scale defence, transportation and enterprise systems have been conducted. This work has established that the method scales to systems with large numbers of requirements but also that it is important to use tool support in order to efficiently navigate and edit such large integrated views of graphical data. Several main results have come out of this work with industry. On average, over a number of projects, 130 confirmed major defects per 1000 requirements have consistently been found after normal reviews and corrections have been made. With less mature requirements sets much higher defect rates have been observed.

An important part of this work with industry has involved applying the analysis part of the method to six large-scale defence projects for Raytheon Australia. They see the method as “a key risk mitigation strategy, of use in both solution development and as a means of advising the customer on problems with acquisition documentation”. An outcome of these industry trials has been the joint development with Raytheon Australia of an industry-strength tool to support the analysis, editing and display of large integrated sets of requirements. More extensive details of industry findings can be found on the Behavior Engineering website.

Dr Terry Stevenson (Chief Technical Officer, Raytheon Australia) and Mr. Jim Boston (Senior Project Manager Raytheon Australia), Mr. Adrian Pitman from the Australian Defence Materiel Organization, Dr Kelvin Ross (CEO, K.J.Ross & Associates) and Christine Cornish (Bushell & Cornish) have provided the special opportunities needed to support this research and to conduct the industry trials and live project work. This work has been supported by the Australian Research Council – ARC Centre for Complex Systems and funds received from industry.