Metacognitive Adaptation : Regulating the Plan Transformation

Recent research in case-based reasoning suggests the use of metacognitive approaches to control the reasoning process. Whereas most of this research focuses on issues related to retrieval and representation, we describe a metacognitive approach to case adaptation based on the generation of questions and answers. The answer generation utilizes particular planning knowledge in the form of introspection plans and adaptation plans. An example of our implementation, IU-LIAN, will illustrate this process. Recent results in case-based reasoning have addressed the control of the reasoning process using ideas from metacognition. The term metacognition describes the \active monitoring and consequent regulation" of the agent's own cognitive processes (Flavell 1976). As a result, we can regard the term metacognition as describing two distinct but related issues: the issue of knowledge about cognition and the issue of regulating cognition. The rst term includes awareness of the agent's resources with respect to the demands of the agent's thinking; for example, the availability of analogous knowledge during an analogical mapping task. The second issue involves self-regulating mechanisms such as planning, monitoring, and self-questioning Such metacognitive skills should be improved with growing experience. Reasoners should be able to adapt and reuse such experience. The concept of reuse of previous experience has been exploited in the paradigm of case-based reasoning where previous experience is usually represented by cases (see Kolodner 1993 for an overview). Important components of the case-based reasoning approach are the retrieval of a previous case and the adaptation of this case to obtain a solution for the current prob-If this approach is applied to plans, we refer to it as case-based planning (Hammond 1989). Metacognitive strategies have been used in previous case-based reasoning approaches have employed case-based planning approaches to perform case-adaptation. However, these earlier examples of adaptation planning do not use metacognitive strategies such as selection and monitoring. Therefore we have developed an approach to plan adaptation which represents the regulation of the adaptation process in the form of adaptation plans and introspection plans. Adaptation plans are used to perform the actual adaptation process, whereas introspection plans are used to monitor and to guide the adaptation process. The retrieval of these plans is supported by questions and answers which are also generated by case-based planning. Representing reasoning stages in the form of plans has the advantage that intentional content and context of the reasoning process can be accessed by metacognitive processes and can be learned. …