Abstract

We develop a simulation method that affords very high variability of virtual pedagogical situations involving many independent plans, still achieves authoring (or implementation) scalability. While each individual plan would be coherently drawn up by an agent for its respective goal, those independently-made plans might be coincidentally intertwined in their execution. The inevitable non-determinism involved in this multi-event plan encompassing pre-planned and unforeseen events is resolved by (multi-phase) dynamic planning and articulated sequencing of events in contrast to static planning and monolithic authoring in conventional narrative systems. Connections between events are dictated by their associated rules and their actual connections are dynamically determined in execution time by current conditions of background-world. This unified connection scheme across pre-planned and unforeseen events allows a multi-plan, multi-agent situation to be coherently planned and executed in a global scale. To further the variability of a situation, the inter-event coupling is made in a fine level of action along with a limited episteme of each agent involved. We confirm analytically the viability of our approach with respect to the situation variability and authoring scalability, and demonstrate its practicality with an implementation of a composite situation.