In formal AI planning

Automated planning and scheduling

Automated planning and scheduling is a branch of artificial intelligence that concerns the realization of strategies or action sequences, typically for execution by intelligent agents, autonomous robots and unmanned vehicles. Unlike classical control and classification problems, the solutions are...

, a partial plan is a plan which specifies all actions that need to be taken, but does not specify an exact order for the actions as the order does not matter. It is the result of a partial-order planner

Partial-order planning

Partial-order planning is an approach to automated planning. The basic idea is to leave the decision about the order of the actions as open as possible. Given a problem description, a partial-order plan is a set of all needed actions and order conditions for the actions where needed.The approach is...

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Linearization

A linearization of a partial order plan is a total order plan derived of the particular partial order plan.

Example

For example, a plan for baking a cake might start:

• go to the store
• get eggs; get flour; get milk
• pay for all goods
• go to the kitchen

This is a partial plan because the order for finding eggs, flour and milk is not specified, the agent can wander around the store reactively

Reactive planning

In artificial intelligence, reactive planning denotes a group of techniques for action selection by autonomous agents. These techniques differ from classical planning in two aspects. First, they operate in a timely fashion and hence can cope with highly dynamic and unpredictable environments....

accumulating all the items on its shopping list until the list is complete.