A Novel Multi-Agent Planning System for Digital Interactive Storytelling

Digital Interactive Storytelling (DIS) is a relatively novel area of computer entertainment that aims at investigating interactive applications capable of generating consistent, emergent, and rich stories. To provide new solutions for DIS, we designed and are implementing and evaluating a novel multi-agent DIS framework, DIEGESIS, which includes agents' coordination and new planning and re-planning solutions. In this article, we discuss the design and implementation of DIEGESIS, explaining in detail the mechanisms of our planning algorithms, and the story execution and agent coordination algorithms, along with a planning methods evaluation and agent planning and coordination examples. We are currently in the process of creating a large DIS scenario, involving the story of Homer's Troy, with several levels that will allow us to further evaluate and expand our system

Cooperative Epistemic Multi-Agent Planning for Implicit Coordination

Epistemic planning can be used for decision making in multi-agent situations with distributed knowledge and capabilities. Recently, Dynamic Epistemic Logic (DEL) has been shown to provide a very natural and expressive framework for epistemic planning. We extend the DEL-based epistemic planning framework to include perspective shifts, allowing us to define new notions of sequential and conditional planning with implicit coordination. With these, it is possible to solve planning tasks with joint goals in a decentralized manner without the agents having to negotiate about and commit to a joint policy at plan time. First we define the central planning notions and sketch the implementation of a planning system built on those notions. Afterwards we provide some case studies in order to evaluate the planner empirically and to show that the concept is useful for multi-agent systems in practice.Comment: In Proceedings M4M9 2017, arXiv:1703.0173

Run-Time Selection of Coordination Mechanisms in Multi-Agent Systems

This paper presents a framework that enables autonomous agents to dynamically select the mechanism they employ in order to coordinate their inter-related activities. Adopting this framework means coordination mechanisms move from the realm of being imposed upon the system at design time, to something that the agents select at run-time in order to fit their prevailing circumstances and their current coordination needs. Empirical analysis is used to evaluate the effect of various design alternatives for the agent's decision making mechanisms and for the coordination mechanisms themselves