{"type":"ScholarlyArticle","title":"Topological Planning with Post-unique and Unary Actions","authors":[{"name":"Guillaume Prévost","slug":"guillaume-prevost","given":"Guillaume","family":"Prévost","affiliation":"Académie Militaire de Saint-Cyr Coëtquidan , CReC Saint-Cyr , France"},{"name":"Stéphane Cardon","slug":"stephane-cardon","given":"Stéphane","family":"Cardon","affiliation":"Académie Militaire de Saint-Cyr Coëtquidan , CReC Saint-Cyr , France"},{"name":"Tristan Cazenave","slug":"tristan-cazenave","given":"Tristan","family":"Cazenave","affiliation":"Université Paris Dauphine -PSL , LAMSADE , CNRS , France"},{"name":"Christophe Guettier","slug":"christophe-guettier","given":"Christophe","family":"Guettier","affiliation":"Safran Electronics and Defense , France"},{"name":"Éric Jacopin","slug":"eric-jacopin","given":"Éric","family":"Jacopin","affiliation":"Hawkswell Studios , France"}],"abstract":"We are interested in realistic planning problems to model the behavior of Non-Playable Characters (NPCs) in video games. Search-based action planning, introduced by the game F.E.A.R. in 2005, has an exponential time complexity allowing to control only a dozen NPCs between two frames. A close study of the plans generated in first-person shooters shows that: (1) actions are unary, (2) actions are contextually post-unique and (3) there is no two instances of the same action in an NPC’s plan. By considering (1), (2) and (3) as restrictions, we introduce new classes of problems with the Simplified Action Structure formalism which indeed allow to model realistic problems and whose instances are solvable by a linear-time algorithm. We also experimentally show that our algorithm is capable of managing millions of NPCs per frame.","doi":"10.24963/ijcai.2023/603","url":"https://ijcai.org/proceedings/2023/603","pdf":"https://ijcai.org/proceedings/2023/0603.pdf","markdown":"https://ijcai.org/proceedings/2023/603.md","bibtex":"https://ijcai.org/proceedings/2023/bibtex/603","volume":{"slug":"2023","title":"Proceedings of the Thirty-Second International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence","short_title":"IJCAI 2023","url":"https://ijcai.org/proceedings/2023/","year":2023,"location":"Macao, SAR","dates":"19-25 August 2023","editors":"Edith Elkind","isbn":"978-1-956792-03-4","publisher":"International Joint Conferences on Artificial Intelligence Organization","doi_prefix":"10.24963/ijcai.2023"},"section":"Planning and Scheduling","track":"Main Track","number":603,"pages":{"first":5429,"last":5436},"keywords":["Planning and Scheduling: PS: Planning algorithms","Multidisciplinary Topics and Applications: MDA: Computer games","Planning and Scheduling: PS: Real-time planning"],"videos":[],"references":[{"position":1,"raw":"[Bäckström, 1992] Christer Bäckström. 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