• International Journal of Contents
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• 제16권1호
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• pp.25-33
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• 2020

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.

• International Journal of Contents
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• 제14권3호
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• pp.7-16
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• 2018

The extent and depth of the event plan determines the scope of pedagogical experience in situations and consequently the quality of immersive learning based on our simulated world. In contrast to planning in conventional narrative-based systems mainly pursuing dramatic interests, planning in virtual world-based pedagogical systems strive to provide realistic experiences in immersed situations. Instead of story plot comprising predetermined situations, our inter-event planning method aims at simulating diverse situations that each involve multiple events coupled via their associated agents' conditions and meaningful associations between events occurring in a background world. The specific techniques to realize our planning method include, two-phase planning based on inter-event search and intra-event decomposition (down to the animated action level); autonomous and independent agents to behave proactively with their own belief and planning capability; full-blown background world to be used as the comprehensive stage for all events to occur in; coupling events via realistic association types including deontic associations as well as conventional causality; separation of agents from event roles; temporal scheduling; and parallel and concurrent event progression mechanism. Combining all these techniques, diverse exogenous events can be derived and seamlessly (i.e., semantically meaningfully) integrated with the original event to form a wide scope of situations providing chances of abundant pedagogical experiences. For effective implementation of plan execution, we devise an execution scheme based on multiple priority queues, particularly to realize concurrent progression of many simultaneous events to simulate its corresponding reality. Specific execution mechanisms include modeling an action in terms of its component motions, adjustability of priority for agent across different events, and concurrent and parallel execution method for multiple actions and its expansion for multiple events.