Framework for multi-agent planning and coordination in DIS

Digital Interactive Storytelling (DIS) is a relatively novel area of computer entertainment which 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 which includes agents' coordination and new planning and re-planning solutions. In this paper, we introduce the development of the framework, along with a multi-agent system scalability evaluation. The framework is described in detail and specified to meet the requirement of bringing a more dynamic interactive story experience to the medium of computer games. Some of the novel aspects of our framework are: the introduction of constraints in the planning/re-planning solutions that allows us to extend the power and expressiveness of the representation language that we use; and our proposal for re-planning, which aims to interleave plan generation and opportunistic plan execution, to be able to re-plan when unexpected changes occur in dynamic environments whilst introducing minimal disruption to the original plan.