Abstract: Disclosed are systems and methods for specifying goals and behavioral parameters for planning systems of autonomous vehicles. In some aspects, a method includes receiving, by a mission manager in an autonomous vehicle (AV), a mission from an input source of the AV, the mission comprising a request for a task that the AV is to fulfill; deconflicting the mission with one or more other missions of the AV to generate a ranked list of missions; selecting a target mission from the ranked list of missions in accordance with priorities corresponding to each mission in the ranked list of missions; generating one or more scenarios based on the target mission, the one or more scenarios comprising encoded representations of local and geometric terms to cause the target mission to be fulfilled by the AV; and dispatching the one or more scenarios to a planner layer of the AV.