Planning, anticipatory systems, and kinds of actors

Anticipation and planning have much in common. Anticipation means being ahead of things. Planning means not only anticipating on things to come, but also trying to determine a course of action to reach a goal. Planning is investigated in many domains, for example, in economy, biology, and in the cognitive sciences. Each of these domains uses its own research methodologies, languages, ontologies, and models. Although there are many differences between the various approaches and models, there must of course also be similarities, since they all deal with establishing a future course of actions to reach a goal. We will compare several planning approaches on a number of aspects, e.g.,the kind of entity that makes the plan (natural or artificial), whether the plan is executed by the planner or by another entity, representational issues, and the domain that the plan is executed in. Our article focuses on analytical dimensions in the extended field of planning. We do not discuss empirical results.