A Model-Based Approach to Blame-Assignment in Design

We analyze the blame-assignment task in the context of experience-based design and redesign of physical devices. We identify three types of blame-assignment tasks that differ in the types of information they take as input: the design does not achieve a desired behavior of the device, the design results in an undesirable behavior, a specific structural element in the design misbehaves. We then describe a modelbased approach for solving the blame-assignment task. This approach uses structure-behavior-function models that capture a designer’s comprehension of the way a device works in terms of causal explanations of how its structure results in its behaviors. We also address the issue of indexing the models in memory. We discuss how the three types of blame-assignment tasks require different types of indices for accessing the models. Finally we describe the KRITIK2 system that implements and evaluates this model-based approach to blame assignment.