Editorial Strategy planner: Graphical definition of soccer set-plays João Cravo a,d , Fernando Almeida f,g , Pedro Henriques Abreu b,c, ⁎, Luís Paulo Reis a,d , Nuno Lau e,f , Luís Mota h,d a Department of Informatics Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, University of Porto, Rua Dr. Roberto Frias, 4200-465 Porto, Portugal b Department of Informatics Engineering, Faculty of Sciences and Technology, Rua Sílvio Lima, Universidade de Coimbra — Pólo II, 3030-790 Coimbra, Portugal c Centre for Informatics and Systems, Universidade de Coimbra, DEI, Pólo II, Pinhal de Marrocos, 3030-290 Coimbra, Portugal d Artificial Intelligence and Computer Science Laboratory, University of Porto, Rua Dr. Roberto Frias, 4200-465 Porto, Portugal e University of Aveiro, Campus Universitrio de Santiago, 3810-193 Aveiro, Portugal f Institute of Electronics and Telematics Engineering of Aveiro, Campus Universitário de Santiago, 3810-193 Aveiro, Portugal g Department of Informatics, Polytechnic Institute of Viseu, Campus Politécnico de Repeses, 3504-510 Viseu, Portugal h University Institute of Lisboa (ISCTE — IUL), Avenida das Foras Armadas, 1649-026 Lisboa, Portugal article info abstract Article history: Received 16 October 2012 Received in revised form 18 September 2014 Accepted 9 October 2014 Available online 22 October 2014 One of the research topics on multi-agent systems focuses on the development of mechanisms such as plans to empower a team of agents to cooperate in order to perform complex tasks. In many cases, the definition of these plans are based on a specific and rather complex grammar and stored in structured text files. In the context of the 2D simulated Robotic Soccer domain, a set-play language was proposed to coordinate the execution of teammates' behaviors to improve a team's overall performance. The process of manually writing set-play definitions is hazardous and can benefit from the use of a graphical tool to reach new users and allow typical users to become more productive. This work presents such a tool for which several experiments were run to measure its usability with forty two users by having them perform a set of tasks for which their execution time, number errors and satisfaction were recorded. The tool reduced the previous average time required to completely define a set-play by 90% and enabled even non-expert users to use it. Moreover, users were on average satisfied with SPlanner having ranked it with a score of 77 (out of 100) using a System Usability Scale questionnaire. © 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. Keywords: Data and knowledge visualization Methodologies and tools Graphical planning Set-play Robotic soccer 1. Introduction Artificial Intelligence and Robotics have been two areas of research which have received a great deal of attention over the past few years. These areas of research have been fostered particularly by international initiatives like RoboCup which accommodates many challenging competitions. From these competitions the one with the most fans is undoubtedly the soccer competition due to its wide acceptance over the world. This competition places two teams of robotic agents up against each other to dispute victory in a soccer match. Teams have been improving performance by creating new strategies that currently consider the definition of strategic positioning [1–6] based on formations, tactics and set-plays [7–9]. A set-play can be part of a team's strategy and is a widely known concept in real soccer as well as in other cooperative sports to leverage a competitive advantage against an opposing team. A set-play can be described as a structured plan that describes courses of actions that a subset of players in a team should take based on the current state of a game. Some attempts to make use of set- Data & Knowledge Engineering 94 (2014) 110–131 ⁎ Corresponding author at: Department of Informatics Engineering, Faculty of Sciences and Technology, Rua Sílvio Lima, Universidade de Coimbra — Pólo II, 3030-790 Coimbra, Portugal; Centre for Informatics and Systems, Universidade de Coimbra, DEI, Pólo II, Pinhal de Marrocos, 3030-290 Coimbra, Portugal. E-mail address: pha@dei.uc.pt (P.H. Abreu). http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.datak.2014.10.001 0169-023X/© 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Data & Knowledge Engineering journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/datak