Scheduling Live Interactive Narratives with Mixed-Integer Linear Programming

Abstract

A live interactive narrative (LIN) is an experience where multiple players take on fictional roles and interact with real-world objects and actors to participate in a pre-authored narrative. Temporal properties of LINs are important to its viability and aesthetic quality and hence deserve special design consideration. In this paper, we tackle the largely overlooked problem of scheduling a multiplayer interactive narrative and propose the Live Interactive Narrative Scheduling Problem (LINSP), which handles reasoning under temporal uncertainty, resource scheduling, and non-linear plot choices. We present a mixed-integer linear programming formulation of the problem and empirically evaluates its scalability over large narrative instances.

Clockwork: A Discrete Event and Agent-Based Social Simulation Framework

“…We quickly realized that the high granularity of interactions, the number of days that needed to be simulated, and the large number of agents that needed to be simulated made these solutions not scalable. In each case, the simulation time, depending on the method we tried, took over an hour 9 . In comparison, the Clockwork engine took 1 minute and 12 seconds on average for the same environment, allowing for fast human decision-making and corporate policy design.…”

“…For our case study, agents only accept invitations if they are free. In the future, this can be changed to support a more dynamic scheduling system that supports temporal uncertainty [9], canceling or rescheduling of calendar events based on the simulated need.…”