Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Many problems require multi-step solutions. This is true of both planning and diagnosis. How can a problem solver best generate an ordered sequence of actions to resolve a problem? In many domains, complete pre-planning is not an option because the results of steps can vary, thus a large tree of possible sequences would have to be generated. W e propose a method that integrates the use of previous plans or cases with use of knowledge of relationships between goals, and the use of reasoning using domain knowledge to incrementally suggest the actions to take. The suggestion process is constrained by heuristics that specify the circumstances under which an instance of a particular reasoning goal can follow from an instance of other reasoning goals. W e discuss the general approach, then present the suggestion methods and the constraints.