Nice!
The top link isn’t working btw?
I’m deep into marking and viva’s right now, but give it a few weeks and I’ll have a look.
As for use-cases. Have a look on the interweb for a guy called Kevin Dill. He’s got a number of papers out there about using Utility methods. He works for Lockheed Martin, so they’re a bit military, but he gives a good example in one of his papers on the type of decision you might want to make with Utility, or in his case dual-utility. Which might be a good start.
If you read Kevin’s paper, he might give you some ideas for different ways of using the Utility values as well (using highest from the top percentage of choices etc).
I think Utility is a pretty natural fit into BT’s because the decision logic can neatly fit in there. One other area I want to explore over summer is from Valve’s “two robots” demo from a few years back. Having a nice way to author dialogue, multi-agent interactions etc. BT’s are great as a model, but they don’t seem to be that natural for inexperienced users to author. I might do an quick implementation of our StoryBricks approach as an experiment too.
Good work though! more of that sort of thing I say!
BTW: I’m definitely going to be doing a Influence map toolkit too, because a number of my students worked on those and I feel bad for not having the time to do them a tutorial on it. Plus they’re easy and fun!