Opportunistic Reasoning: A Design Perspective

An essential component of opportunistic behavior is opportunity recognition, the recognition of those conditions that facilitate the pursuit of some suspended goal. Opportunity recognition is a special case of situation assessment, the process of sizing up a novel situation. The ability to recognize opportunities for reinstating suspended problem contexts (one way in which goals manifest themselves in design) is crucial to creative design. In order to deal with real world opportunity recognition, we attribute limited inferential power to relevant suspended goals. We propose that goals suspended in the working memory monitor the internal (hidden) representations of the currently recognized objects. A suspended goal is satisfied when the current internal representation and a suspended goal “match”. We propose a computational model for working memory and we compare it with other relevant theories of opportunistic planning. This working memory model is implemented as part of our IMPROVISER system.