Hi,

My team is holding a research on "Planning in Multiagent Systems". Our work in planning will be based on the work of Santiago Ontanon e.i HTN

We have read: Introduction to Planning in Multiagent Systems(2009) it gave us a good introduction to the multiagent planning problem as a whole. We have searched for multiagent in RTS games and here is what we found:

• A Multi-agent Potential Field based bot for a Full RTS Game Scenario
  
• A Scalable Multi-Agent Framework for Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning
  
• Demonstration of Multi-agent Potential Fields in Real-time
  
• Using Multi-agent Potential Fields in Real-time Strategy
  

We are willing to know what is the current state of Multiagent Systems in RTS Games (e.i where it is applied, latest developments, talks, references, etc..)

Any help will be highly appreciated,
Thanks.

I'd appreciate if you can clarify whether your focus is mainly on (1) creating plans by multiple agents or (2) creating plans for multiple agents, or (3) both.

Most commercial RTS games don't employ planners. Several academic RTS AI's use planners, but these are rarely benchmarked against commercial RTS AI's or graded by experienced RTS players. As a results, it is unclear how much planners can do for commercial RTS games and where the state-of-the-art is.

If you open up the scope of your question slightly to real-time (or "we-go" style) war games, then you should look into:
- Creative Assembly's 'Total War' series, from the 'Empire Total War' game onwards is using a two-level GOAP-based planner (see this interview )
- Panther Games' Command Ops: Battle of the Bulges and earlier Airborne Assault game use a planner to direct large battaillon scale military operations (see an old presentation)
- my presentation on an off-line HTN planner for coordinated multi-agent maneuvers (Multi-Unit Planning with HTN and A*)
Note that game AI developers in the industry don't have much incentive to publish the inner workings of their AI, so you might not find much detail to work with. Lack of info doesn't mean that RTS and wargame AI's aren't efficiently handling problems with large unit counts, large move sets per unit, multiple objectives per side and subtle qualitative differences in between potential plans.

For more information on AI for commercial RTS games in general, use this query to find the right articles from the AI Game Programming Wisdom series.

From a panel at the Paris Game AI Conference 2010, the Total War series apparently using a BDI-architecture everywhere, basically reactive and behavior-tree like. It has a goal-based architecture, but apparently it's not GOAP in the classical sense.

In practice planning is very rarely used for RTS games. It's just not computationally feasible at runtime yet IMHO.