Various Planning Techniques

Various Planning Techniques

Several planning techniques are described below.

(1) Hierarchical Planning: In hierarchical planning, at each level of hierarchy the objective functions are reduced to a small number of activities at the next lower level. So the computational cost of finding the correct way to arrange these activities for the current problem is small. Hierarchical methods can result in linear time. The initial plan of hierarchical planning describes the complete problem which is a very high level description. The plans are refined by applying action decompositions. Each action decomposition reduces a high level description to some of the individual lower level descriptions. The action decomposers describe how to implement the actions.

(2) Conditional Planning: It deals with the planning by some appropriate conditions. The agents plan first and then execute the plan that was produced. The agents find out which part of the plan to execute by including sensing actions in the plan to test for the appropriate conditions.

(3) Exact Planning: It is also called as conformation planning. It ensures that the plan achieves the goal in all possible circumstances regardless of the true initial state and the actual actions outcome. This planning is based on the idea that the world can be forced into a given state even when the agent has only partial information about the current state.

(4) Replanning: It occurs when there is any wrong information regarding with the planning. The agent can plan the same plan as the conditional planner or some new steps.

(5) Continuous Planning: In this planning, the planner at first achieves the goal and then only can stop. A continuous planner is designed to persist over a lifetime. It can handle any unfavorable circumstances in the environment.

(6) Multiagent Planning: In multiagent planning some other new agents may involved with our single agent in the environment. This may lead to a poor performance because dealing with other agents is not the same as dealing with the nature. It is necessary when there are other agents in the environment with which to cooperate, compete or coordinate.

(7) Multibody Planning: This planning constructs joint plans, using an efficient decomposition of joint action descriptions, but must be augmented with some form of co-ordination of two cooperative agents are to agree on which joint plan to execute.