SHPE: HTN Planning for Video Games

Abstract

This article describes SHPE (Simple Hierarchical Planning Engine), a hierarchical task network planning system designed to generate dynamic behaviours for real-time video games. SHPE is based on a combination of domain compilation and procedural task application/decomposition techniques in order to compute plans in a very short time-frame. The planner has been able to return relevant plans in less than three milliseconds for several problem instances of the SimpleFPS planning domain.