# 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.

- **Category**: Agentic AI
- **Subcategory**: Planning & Control Flow
- **Canonical URL**: https://designpattern.fyi/patterns/partial_global_planning/

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## Description
**Intent**: Each agent maintains a partial view of others' plans and incrementally merges local plans into a shared partial global plan, interleaving coordination with execution.
**Context**: A multi-agent system coordinates on a problem where a complete global plan is impractical to compute — the problem is too large, the world is non-stationary, or agents only learn what they need to coordinate as they go. Waiting for a global plan to complete before any agent acts is unworkable.
**Solution**: - Each agent runs a planner that produces both local actions and partial-global-plan fragments. - Agents periodically exchange fragments with constraint-neighbours; merging produces consistent shared plan structure for the parts they 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.


## Use Cases
- Multi-agent problem too large for a single global planner.
- World is non-stationary; plans must keep revising as conditions change.
- Coordination benefits exceed fragment-exchange communication cost.





## Trade-offs


### Advantages

- Coordinated behaviour without the cost of a complete global plan.

- Resilient to non-stationary worlds — revisions are local fragment updates.

- Scales beyond what a single planner could handle.




### Considerations & Drawbacks

- Fragment merging is non-trivial; conflicting fragments need a resolution rule.

- Some coordination cases require global structure the fragments don''t capture.

- Thrashing on rapid revisions can degrade into pure local planning.







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**Reference**: [Original Source](https://www.agentpatternscatalog.org/patterns/partial-global-planning/)