Merging strategic and tactical planning in dynamic and uncertain environments

This paper presents a new approach to planning in dynamic and uncertain environments. Planning is viewed as a process in which an agent's long term goals are transformed into short term tasks and objectives, given the agent's strategy and the context of planning. The developed model allows for a dynamic balance between long term strategic planning and short term tactical planning. The notion of a strategy hierarchy is introduced to explicitly represent the process of strategy formulation and refinement. A combination of rules and plan scripts is used. Rules are used for representing domain knowledge and reasoning about strategic choices. Plan scripts are used for representing specific tasks and objectives. The uncertainty calculi of RUM/PRIMO are used for supporting reasoning under uncertainty. In the proposed model, it is also possible to achieve a seamless integration of case-based reasoning into the planning process. These ideas have been implemented in a system called MARS, which plans in the financial domain of mergers and acquisitions