Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Any single algorithm for abduction requires specific kinds of knowledge and ignores other kinds of knowledge. A knowledge- based system that uses a single abductive method, is restricted to using the knowledge required by that method. This makes the system britde, because the single Fixed method can only respond appropriately in a limited range of situations and can only make use of a subset of the potentially relevant knowledge. In this paper, we describe a framework from which abductive strategies can be opportunistically constructed to reflect the problem being solved and the knowledge available to solve the problem. W e also describe ABDSoar, a Soar-based implementation