Abstract

An agent-centric event planning method is proposed for providing pedagogical experiences in an immersed environment. Two-level planning is required at in a macro-level (i.e., inter-event level) and an intra-event level to provide realistic experiences with the objective of learning declarative knowledge. The inter-event (horizontal) planning is based on search, while intra-event (vertical) planning is based on hierarchical decomposition. The horizontal search is dictated by several realistic types of association between events besides the conventional causality. The resulting schematic plan is further augmented by conditions associated with those agents cast into the roles of the events identified in the plan. Rather than following a main story plot, all the events potentially relevant to accomplishing an initial goal are derived in the final result of our planning. These derived events may progress concurrently or digress toward a new main goal replacing the current goal or event, and the plan could be merged or fragmented according to their respective lead agents' intentions and other conditions. The macro-level coherence across interconnected events is established via their common background world existing a priori. As the pivotal source of event concurrency and intricacy, agents are modeled to not only be autonomous but also independent, i.e., entities with their own beliefs and goals (and subsequent plans) in their respective parts of the world. Additional problems our method addresses for augmenting pedagogical experiences include casting of agents into roles based on their availability, subcontracting of subsidiary events, and failure of multi-agent event entailing fragmentation of a plan. The described planning method was demonstrated by monitoring implementation.