A Real-Time Concurrent Planning and Execution Framework for Automated Story Planning for Games

Abstract

This paper presents a framework that facilitates communication between a planning system (“planner”) and a plan execution system (“executor”) to enable them to run concurrently, with the main emphasis on meeting the real-time requirements of the application domain. While the framework is applicable to general-purpose planning, its features are optimized for the requirements of automated story planning for games—with emphasis on monitoring player-triggered events and handling on-time (re-)generation of story assets such as characters, maps and scenarios. This framework subsumes the traditional interleaved planning-and-execution paradigm used in embedded continual planning systems and generalizes it to a non-embedded context, making the framework ideal for use with contemporary game architectures (e.g., multithreaded game engines, or games with subsystems communicating over a network).