Partial Global Planning
Each agent maintains a partial view of others' plans and incrementally merges local plans into a shared partial global plan, interleaving coordination with execution.
Problem
Centralised global planning hits scaling limits and is fragile to change. Fully local planning produces inconsistent action choices that violate global constraints. Without an intermediate — a plan that is partial in coverage and global in scope, refined incrementally as agents share what they know — the team either pauses for impossible centralisation or acts inconsistently in isolation.
Solution
Each agent runs a planner that produces both local actions and partial-global-plan fragments. Agents periodically exchange fragments with neighbours; merging produces consistent shared plan structure for the parts agents care about. When new observations or revisions arrive, the affected fragment is updated and shared again. The team never holds a complete global plan; it holds a sufficient partial one. Execution and planning interleave.
When to use
- Multi-agent problem too large for a single global planner.
- World is non-stationary; plans must keep revising.
- Coordination benefits exceed fragment-exchange cost.
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