Reactive planning

This article includes a list of references, related reading, or external links, but its sources remain unclear because it lacks inline citations. Please help improve this article by introducing more precise citations. (February 2011) (Learn how and when to remove this message)

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. Second, they compute just one next action in every instant, based on the current context. Reactive planners often (but not always) exploit reactive plans, which are stored structures describing the agent's priorities and behaviour. The term reactive planning goes back to at least 1988, and is synonymous with the more modern term dynamic planning.