Design Problem Solving

asking a specialist.

For some specialists a reasonable strategy is not to attempt to recover and merely

to cause the plan to

fail,

leading to selection of another

plan.

The position of the

specialist in the hierarchy, the degree of completion of the current

plan,

and the

amount of backtracking suggested will all affect the decision whether to try redesign.

Another way of deciding whether immediate failure is appropriate is to use some

measure of the "complexity" of the part of the plan already executed. One method of

estimating complexity is based on an estimate of how many design agents it will use.

If the complexity measure is too high the ...