Planning is a research area that focuses on developing methods and tools for designing and optimizing sequences of actions to achieve specific goals or objectives. It involves creating formal models of the planning problem, identifying possible actions and their effects, and determining a sequence of actions that leads to the desired outcome while satisfying any relevant constraints. Planning research may involve artificial intelligence, operations research, and optimization techniques to develop efficient planning algorithms that can be applied in various domains such as robotics, logistics, and scheduling. The goal of planning research is to automate the process of decision-making and problem-solving in complex, uncertain environments.