Planning with Strategic Goals

Abstract

Strategic goals and strategic planning have received much attention in Management Sciences literature since the 60s. In this work, we are interested in putting strategic planning on a formal, algorithmic footing by offering a formal reasoning technique for automatic generation and selection of strategic plans. Towards this end, in previous work [1] we have introduced the concept of strategic goals and dimensional refinement operators that define strategic goals in terms of domain dimensions from the data warehouses literature. Examples of dimensions for a strategic goal such as Increase sales in Europe over 2 years might include time, geography and product type. Here, we propose a formalization of strategic goals and their dimensional refinements that allows one to express a strategic goal model as a planning space that can be achieved across different dimensions. Subsequently, we use automated reasoning solvers to produce optimum strategic plans to achieve such strategic goals. Our proposal is illustrated with an example from the literature.