Failure Processing in a System for Designing Complex Assemblies

Abstract

We believe that the capacity to recover intelligently from intermediate failures and to learn from these failures is an essential ingredient of attempting to solve complex real-world problems. Intelligent failure recovery requires the problem-solver not only to diagnose the causes of its failures, but also to circumscribe carefully the propagation of recovery updating. Learning from failures requires that the problem-solver remember the conditions of its failures in such a way that it will not recreate these conditions. In this paper, we describe methods providing such capabilities. We have implemented and experimented with these methods in a rule-based system used for designing complex assemblies such as electromechanical equipment.