Failure recovery in the MICON system

MICON is a knowledge-based system that designs small computer systems. The synthesis of a digital system may be viewed as successive design and redesign of individual subsystems. Redesign is necessary when the design of one subsystem imposes conflicting requirements on the design of another, and when a design cannot meet specifications. Described is a technique to correct failures during the synthesis process based on dependency-directed backtracking. The dependency network is built dynamically during the design process. The failure recovery scheme implemented is more sophisticated than most existing schemes because of the unstructured problem domain on which it is applied