Continuous Planning for Virtual Environments

Abstract

This chapter discusses the application of intelligent planning techniques to virtual agent environments as a mechanism to control and generate plausible virtual agent behaviour. The authors argue that the real world-like nature of intelligent virtual environments (IVEs) presents issues that cannot be tackled with a classic, off-line planner where planning takes place beforehand and execution is performed later, based on a set of precompiled instructions. What IVEs call for is continuous planning, a generative system that will work in parallel with execution, constantly re-evaluating world knowledge and adjusting plans according to new data. The authors argue further on the importance of incorporating the modelling of the agents’ physical, mental and emotional states as an inherent feature in a continuous planning system targeted towards IVEs, necessary to achieve plausibility in the produced plans and, consequently, in agent behaviour.