Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

To reason about a plan failure requires an appropriate explanation of the failure. Such explanations, as has been argued elsewhere, can be generated by instantiating and adapting abstract knowledge structures. But the two fundamental goals in reasoning about failure, recovering from the failure and repairing the knowledge that led to the failure, require qualitatively different types of explanation. This paper presents an abstract taxonomization of failures, oriented toward the latter problem. Each abstract failure type in the taxonomy is tied to heuristics for recognizing occurrences of failures of that type and for identifying the knowledge that can be repaired to avoid future occurrences of the same failure.