A simulated soccer-playing agent's joy after having scored a goal may, after all, not last long, if the opponent's probability of scoring a goal right after the immediately following kick-off is high. In a recent study, we found out that this may indeed be true.

In our corresponding paper "The Glee Didn't Last Long: How Continuous Integration Helps Revealing Fundamental Flaws in Team-Play", we adopt a reliability engineering approach to analyzing the performance of a team. Reliability theory is the branch of statistics that focuses on the application of probability theory in an engineering context to the modeling of the occurrence of events such as failures and the prediction of success probabilities. Events of interest may, in the case of robotic soccer, include the conceding of a goal (which represents the failure of a team's defense).

We also present - and publicly share - a continuous integration and deployment (CI/CD) framework for Soccer Simulation 2D. We utilized this framework to find critical game situations, uncover weaknesses in the playing behavior of our soccer simulation team, and implement and evaluate appropriate counter measures. For more details, you might have a look into the full paper.