AlternativePlanner

AlternativePlanner is a planning framework and concept used to generate and compare multiple viable plans to achieve specified goals under uncertainty. It emphasizes exploring alternative strategies rather than settling on a single course of action, enabling decision makers to anticipate contingencies and trade-offs.

Its core functions include plan generation, evaluation against objective and constraint criteria, scenario management, and re-planning. The framework typically supports uncertainty modeling (such as probabilistic outcomes or scenario ensembles), plan-space search, and multi-objective optimization to produce a set of competing plans with associated risks, costs, and benefits. Many implementations separate a planner engine, a scenario manager, and an evaluation module, with interfaces for data inputs and decision-support visualization.

Applications span fields such as urban and regional planning, disaster and emergency response, supply chain and logistics, robotics and autonomous systems, and corporate strategy. Benefits include enhanced resilience, better visibility into trade-offs, and more robust, adaptable operations. Challenges involve computational complexity, data quality, integration with governance processes, and ensuring that generated plans remain actionable in dynamic environments.

AlternativePlanner is related to contingency planning, scenario planning, robust optimization, and general AI planning. In practice, it supports decision makers by documenting multiple plausible futures and the actions best suited for each, rather than relying on a single forecast. An example use case is a city planning for flood risk: the system can propose alternative routes, resource allocations, and timing strategies under different flood scenarios.