The research work presented in this thesis is directed at addressing the knowledge acquisition bottleneck frequently encountered in computer simulation. The central idea is to extract the required knowledge from video data and use this to drive a computer simulation instead of the more conventional approach of interviewing domain experts and somehow encapsulating this knowledge in a manner whereby it can be used in the context of computer simulation. More specifically the idea presented in this thesis is to extract object location information from video data and then to mine this information to identify Movement Patterns (MPs) and then to utalise these MPs in the context of computer simulation. To act as a focus for the work rodent behaviour simulation was considered. Partly because video data concerning rodent behaviour was relatively easy to obtain and partly because there is a genuine need to achieve a better understanding of rodent behaviour. This is especially the case in the context of crop damage. There are a variety of computer simulation frameworks. One that naturally lends itself to rodent simulation is Multi Agent Based Simulation (MABS) whereby the objects to be simulated (rodents) are encapsulated in terms of software agents. In more detail the work presented is directed at a number of research issues in the context of the above: (i) mechanisms to identify a moving object in video data and extracting associated location information, (ii) the mining of MPs from the extracted location information, (iii) the representation of MPs in such a way that they are compatible with computer simulation frameworks especially MABS frameworks and (iv) mechanisms where by MPs can be utilized and interacted with so as to drive a MABS. Overall two types of mechanisms are considered, Absolute and Relative. The operation of rodent MABSs, driven using the proposed MP concept, is fully illustrated in the context of different categories of scenarios. The evaluation of the proposed MP driven MABSs was conducted by comparing real world scenarios to parallel simulated scenarios. The results presented in the thesis demonstrated that the proposed mechanisms for extracting locations, and consequently mining MPs, from video data to drive a MABS provides a useful approach to effective computer simulation that will have wide ranging benefits
