Metacognition for Self-Regulated Learning in a Dynamic Environment

Darsana P. Josyula, Franklin C. Hughes, Harish Vadali, Bette J. Donahue

Fassil Molla, Michelle Snowden, Jalissa Miles, Ahmed Kamara and Chinomnso Maduka
Department of Computer Science
Bowie State University, Bowie, MD 20715
darsana@cs.umd.edu
This research has been supported in part by grants from NSF and NASA.

AbstractThis paper describes a self-regulated learning
system that uses metacognition to decide what to learn, when
to learn and how to learn in order to succeed in a dynamic
environment. Metacognition provides the system the ability to
monitor anomalies and to dynamically change its behavior to
fix or work around them. The dynamic environment for the
system is an air traffic control domain that has six approach
vectors for planes to land. The system has access to three basic
approach strategies for choosing a landing terminal: Nearest
Terminal, Free Terminal and Queued Terminal. In addition,
the system has access to a supervised-learning algorithm that
can be used to create new strategies. The system has the ability
to generate its own training data sets to train the supervised-
learner.
The metacognitive component of the system monitors various
expectations; anomalies in the environment cause expectation
violations. These expectation violations act as indicators for
what, when and how to learn. For instance, if an expecta-
tion violation occurs because aircraft are not being assigned
approach vectors within a given time threshold, the system
automatically triggers a change in landing strategies. Examples
of anomalies that cause expectation violations include closing
one or more of the six approach vectors or changing all of
their geographical locations simultaneously. In either case, the
system will respond to the situation by assigning the planes to
one of the currently active approach vectors.
I. I NTRODUCTION
The ability of an agent to learn about its environment
and make decisions based on that information can mean the
difference between success and failure. Recent work [1], [2],
[3] on human learning has suggested that the best learners
are the ones who practice self-regulated learning.
Self-regulated learning refers to the ability of an agent
to be able to determine when to learn, what to learn and
how to learn. Knowing when to learn requires an ability to
judge when to start and stop learning. Knowing what to learn
requires an ability to identify the specific piece of knowledge
that is lacking. Knowing how to learn requires an ability to
choose the best learning strategy available to learn what is
required. Metacognition, the act of thinking about thinking,
is an integral part of this process. It allows agents to change
the way learning occurs.
For students, an example of these steps is exam prepa-
ration. A student notes that an exam is approaching and
decides that his knowledge of some subject is lacking. The
student then chooses the best way to learn the required
material. The student may decide to re-read the section of the
textbook that deals with that subject. Or, perhaps the student
is more hands on, so instead of reading the text he would
solve sample problems or he is more visual and would find
a video tutorial online. The student stops reading, solving,
or watching when he is confident that his knowledge has
improved enough to earn the grade he desires. Metacognition
guided self-regulated learning gives the student the ability to
learn how to construct a learning strategy that is appropriate
for a particular problem.
In this paper we discuss how a metacognitive component
can allow self-regulated learning in a dynamic environment
an air traffic control domain. The air traffic controller
(ATC) is tasked with deciding which approach path each
incoming aircraft should be assigned. The ATC is equipped
with three basic approach path selection strategies and is
capable of creating new strategies based on different learning
algorithms.
The metacognitive component of the ATC helps it learn
the landing strategy that is most appropriate for the con-
figuration of the environment that it is situated in. The
learning may be as simple as changing the current strategy
to a different but pre-existing strategy or as complicated
as discovering a new strategy to add to its repository of
available strategies. The metacognitive component of the
ATC initiates the creation of new strategies or switching
to alternate strategies in response to failed expectations.
For creating new strategies, the metacognitive component
of the ATC sets the training parameters (e.g., training
duration, data set size and desired output function) based
on the current environmental configuration, triggers creation
of a training data set making use of the training parameters
and initiates a supervised learning algorithm to train on the
data set.
The following sections describe the domain in which
the ATC and its metacognitive component were tested, the
real power behind metacognition as illustrated by examples,
other related work, our conclusions and future work to be
done.
 II. A IR T RAFFIC C ONTROL S IMULATOR
The air traffic control simulator has two major
components(i) the ATC that monitors the traffic within
a specified radar range and directs aircraft toward available
approach paths, and (ii) the aircraft that fly towards the ATC
monitored radar area, wait for direction from ATC for an
approach path and use that approach path for landing.
The simulated x-y area is a 10, 000 by 10, 000 unit
square with the ATC at its center: (5000, 5000). Aircraft
have a z component representing their altitude (minimum :
0, maximum : 500). The ATCs radar range is a square with
corners at (2500, 2500) and (7500, 7500).
The aircraft are spawned randomly in the region outside
the ATCs radar range. The aircraft initiate a connection
with the ATC upon creation and are issued a unique ID.
The aircraft use their default destination which is the ATCs
location at (5000, 5000) to determine their initial flight path.
Aircraft outside of the ATCs radar range fly under their own
guidance until they cross into the area, at which point they
begin to circle until the ATC determines and communicates
instructions. Communication between the aircraft and the
ATC is accomplished by TCP/IP socket connection. All
aircraft land at the ATCs location and must fly there through
one of six approach paths located within 1000 units of
the ATC. Once the aircraft lands, its trajectory and current
position are erased from the GUI.
A. Aircraft Actions
Each aircraft can perform the following actions:
1) Fly to a destination at (x, y, z): The aircraft deter-
mines the proper velocities in the x, y and z directions to
take it from its current location to the destination in as
straight a line as possible.
2) Fly through multiple destinations: The aircraft flies
through a list of destinations in order, each time flying
straight from one goal to the next and ending at the final
destination.
3) Fly in a circle: The aircraft flies in a circle of a
specified radius.
4) Delay: The aircraft delays its flight by slowing down
its speed.
5) Communicate with the ATC: The aircraft communi-
cates with the ATC by sending messages to the ATC and
receiving messages from the ATC. The aircraft can send
one of two messages:
An update containing the aircrafts current location,
goal location and flight path.
A message telling the ATC that it has successfully
landed and will disconnect.
The aircraft can receive messages (See Section II-B1)
from the ATC that contain instructions on the actions to
be performed.
6) Land: The aircraft checks its location against a list of
possible approach paths and if it matches one it will begin
to perform a landing maneuver which takes the aircraft from
its current location and altitude to the ATCs location and
an altitude of 0.
B. ATC Actions
The ATC can perform the following actions:
1) Communicate with each aircraft: The ATC can send
one of the following messages to one or more of the aircraft:
An ID message that contains a unique identifier that the
aircraft receive on creation. This ID is used by the ATC
for tracking and modifying the flight path of specific
planes, identifying new planes entering its radar range
and distinguishing between different aircraft displayed
on the GUI display.
A terminal approach message that contains instructions
for the aircraft to use one of the six (or more) approach
paths.
A delay message that can be accomplished by either
slowing down or flying in a circle.
A destination updating message that contains one or
more destinations the aircraft must fly through.
The ATC can also receive messages from all aircraft
within the radar range.
2) Alter approach paths: The ATC can add, delete, or
edit existing approach path locations. There must always be
a minimum of one approach path but there is no maximum.
3) Change strategy for choosing approach paths: The
ATC must choose between multiple strategies for determin-
ing the most efficient approach path an aircraft should take.
The ATC (with its metacognitive component) is capable
of choosing between multiple arrival strategies. Nearest
Terminal, Free Terminal, and Queued Terminal are the
basic strategies available to the ATC. In addition to the
basic strategies available, the ATC is capable of creating
other strategies by self-initiated supervised learning (See
Section II-B4). The basic strategies are discussed next.
Nearest Terminal Strategy
Under this strategy, aircraft will be assigned to the
closest approach path. Once an aircraft has been cleared
to approach from a specific approach path, that path is
unavailable to others until the first aircraft has landed.
Other aircraft reaching the ATC radar range must wait
their turn for assignment to an empty approach path by
circling at the outer radar region.
Free Terminal Strategy:
Aircraft will be assigned to the nearest free approach
path when ATC uses this strategy. As in Nearest
Terminal Srategy, once an aircraft has been cleared to
approach from a specific approach path, that path is
unavailable to others until the first aircraft has landed.
However, unlike Nearest Terminal Strategy, in this
strategy other aircraft may be diverted to another free
 path if such a path is available. If no path is free, then
this strategy works similar to Nearest Terminal Strategy
and the other aircraft must wait their turns by circling
at the outer radar region.
Queued Terminal Strategy:
This strategy involves the Nearest Terminal strategy
with two important differences: (i) the approach path is
not closed down after an aircraft has been assigned to it,
and (ii) the speed of each aircraft can be manipulated to
avoid collisions. The advantage of this strategy is that
the duration for which an aircraft circles before it gets
assigned an approach path may be shorter if this aircraft
can move towards an approach path without colliding
with other aircraft that are already moving toward their
designated approach paths.
The strategy places a maximum of five aircraft into a
landing queue for each approach path. Once the queue
is full other aircraft will be forced to circle and wait
until there is room in the queue. While the first aircraft
is on approach at full speed, the second aircrafts flight
path from its current location to the starting point of
the approach path is checked against the first aircrafts
flight path. If the ATC detects that a collision between
the two aircraft is likely to occur it calculates a modified
slower speed for the second aircraft and directs the
second aircraft to fly at the modified speed. The third
aircraft in the queue has its likely flight path checked
against the first and second and so on.
4) Create New Strategies using Supervised Learning: The
ATC can discover new strategies for choosing the approach
paths by self-initiated supervised learning. The ATC creates
its own training data set dynamically with a variable number
of data points gathered from a virtul ATC which is operated
in the system background. The virtual ATC spawns virtual
planes at random points or from specific regions according
to the the training data requested.
The size of the training data is determined by the metacog-
nitive component. Each input for creating the training data
set includes (i) the approach paths, (ii) a set of locations
and speeds of aircraft that are in the radar range and (iii)
the current speed and location of an aircraft for which the
approach terminal and flight speed need to be determined.
Each output includes the approach path that the aircraft
should be assigned to and the flight speed for that aircraft.
The output data for the training set is determined by applying
the Queued Terminal strategy to the created input data.
Once the training data is created, varying configurations
of a supervised learning algorithm are applied to each
training set in order to determine if new strategies with lower
anomaly rates can be created for situations modeling the
training data. Because of this feature the ATC is capable of
dynamically learning new strategies increasing its robustness
and ability to operate in a dynamic environment.
The supervised learning algorithm that is used in the
current version of the simulator is a back propogation neural
network. Out of this learning will come a completely new
strategy that is added to the ATCs repertoire of Nearest
Terminal, Free Terminal and Queued Terminal strategies.
This process allows the ATC to learn new strategies that can
help in a dynamic environment. If the newly formed strategy
is put into use and the metacognitive component continues
to see expectation violations the size of the training data is
increased and the strategy creation process is restarted.
5) Avoid Collisions: The basic three strategies guarantee
that there will be no direct collisions among the aircraft
inside the ATCs radar region; however, this need not be
the case for the self-learned strategies. Also, under Queued
Terminal strategy it is possible to have aircraft right next
to each other and this close proximity is dangerous in
the real world. For these two reasons, a separate fail-safe
collision avoidance mechanism is available to the ATC. This
mechanism automatically maintains minimum safe distance
zones around each aircraft by calculating their future flight
paths and manipulating the speed of one or more aircraft
should they intersect.
6) Perform Metacognitive Monitoring and Control: The
ATC is equipped with a metacognitive component that moni-
tors expectations and offers responses when the expectations
are not being fulfilled. In our dynamic environment the
ATCs ability to perform metacognition makes it a far
more effective tool than otherwise. Metacognition makes it
possible for the ATC to realize when its standard strategies
are ineffective and guides the ATC to learn and apply new
ones. Figures 1 through 4 show the flow of information to
and from the components of the ATC.
C. ATC Component Interaction
Figure 1. The basic interaction between the components of the ATC.
Figure 1 broadly describes the interaction of the metacog-
nitive component, control modules, user interface and
knowledge base. The control modules update and access
the knowledge base, the metacognitive component checks
the observations in the knowledge base against its own
expectations in order to adjust the control modules and
inform the user when needed. The user interface allows
the user to alter the performance of the control modules
and introduce anomalies for testing purposes. Figures 2
through 4 show the detailed interactions of each component
under different circumstances.
Figure 2. The detailed interactions of the components of the ATC when
the metacognitive component is not involved in decision making.
Figure 2 shows the operation of the ATC when the chosen
strategy is performing as desired. The strategy executor
feeds the flight data and approach path locations into the
algorithm of the currently selected strategy to calculate each
aircrafts designated flight velocity and approach path which
are then communicated to each aircraft. The metacognitive
component monitors the observations but otherwise is not
involved because each of them falls within the expected
thresholds.
Figure 3. The detailed interactions of the components of the ATC when
the metacognitive component is actively taking part in decision making.
Figure 3 shows the operation of the ATC when the
chosen strategy is not performing as desired. Within the
knowledge base are the current observations of collision
frequency, flight speeds, and flight durations. The metacogni-
tive component has, within its own separate knowledge base,
expectations in the form of threshold values for each of these
observations. If the observed value of collision frequency is
beyond the threshold value, the metacognitive component
registers an expectation violation and lowers the current
strategys effectiveness rating. The metacognitive component
then instructs the strategy chooser to search through the strat-
egy repository for the highest rated strategy and implement
it. Once implemented, the metacognitive component waits
for further observations. Should more expectation violations
occur it can instruct the strategy creator to initiate the
creation of entirely new strategies and then use the strategy
chooser to implement them in an attempt to find a more
effective solution while at the same time keeping the user
updated with its actions through the user interface.
Figure 4. The detailed interaction of the User Interface with the various
control modules of the ATC.
Figure 4 shows how the user interface (UI) can be used to
introduce anomalies into the system. From the UI, users can
change approach path locations, initiate strategy creation,
manually select the current strategy, and control the flow of
communication to and from the aircraft. The expectations
of the metacognitive component were chosen such that the
component itself need not be aware of each of the numerous
ways the system can break down. All the anomalies will have
some effect on the observations stored in the knowledge
base which will cause a triggering of the metacognitive
component should the values cross the thresholds as the
following examples illustrate.
The user blocks the communication of a designated
approach path from an aircraft so that it continues
to circle, not knowing that it should have received a
clearance to approach. The aircrafts flight duration will
increase eventually crossing the threshold value and
 starting the metacognitive components response.
The user moves the approach path locations. The col-
lision frequency and/or the flight durations could be
adversely impacted raising them enough to trigger the
metacognitive components response.
The user selects a strategy that is not efficient for
the current set of aircraft, communicates an incorrect
approach path or sends an aircraft into an infinite loop.
In each case the increase in flight duration would trigger
the metacognitive components response.
With proper expectations and response strategies in place,
all possible failure models need not be hard coded into
the system. Metacognition allows the system to deal with
different failures by monitoring expectations and responding
to expectation violations.
III. T HE P OWER OF M ETACOGNITION
The ATC makes its metacognitive component aware of
the following observations: (i) aircraft circle times, (ii) flight
speeds, (iii) aircraft locations, (iv) the number of times the
collision avoidance mechanism is used under the current
strategy and (v) the strategies that are available in the
repository. The expectations of the metacognitive component
are as follows:
Each flight will land within 100 seconds of coming into
the ATCs radar region.
The aircraft speed should match the speed the ATC
assigns to it.
The collision avoidance system should be used a min-
imal number of times.
The number of strategies that are available must be
greater than 5.
If an expectation violation occurs because there are
not enough strategies available for choosing terminals, the
metacognitive component will trigger the strategy creator to
generate new test data in order to create a new strategy by
applying various supervised learning algorithms. Once the
ATC learns a new strategy, that strategy becomes part of the
strategy repository.
Should the flight times continue to exceed expectations
or the collision avoidance mechanism be over worked the
metacognitive component will ask the ATC to change to
another strategy that has not been tried yet. The new strategy
could be a newly discovered one.
If further expectation violation occurs, the metacognitive
component can tell the strategy creator to increase the
number of data points that it uses to generate training data
in order to create a more robust strategy that provides more
efficient results. The metacognitive component can tell the
ATC to use any of the strategies it knows and it can delete
strategies that do not perform.
A. Illustration
The following example illustrates how the metacognitive
component helps the ATC regulate its learning of the best
strategy to be used in a dynamic environment.
Figure 5. Trajectories of multiple aircraft flying toward the ATC
Figure 5 shows the GUI with multiple aircraft beginning
their flights toward the ATC. The darkened center rectangle
represents the ATCs radar range. Once an aircraft crosses
the radar range it circles until the ATC consults its current
strategy and communicates instructions. The default strategy
is Nearest Terminal.
The aircraft and their trajectories are represented by the
thick dark lines, their current position is marked by the
ID/Altitude label. The ATC is located at the center of the
radar region. Each of the lines connected to the ATCs
location represent one of six approach paths the aircraft must
use. Although the number and location of these approach
paths can change, shown here are the six default values.
Under the Nearest Terminal strategy an aircraft entering
into the ATCs radar range is assigned to its closest approach
path if the path is free otherwise it begins to circle. The
disadvantage is that multiple aircraft could be circling while
waiting for one approach path when adjoining approach
paths are free. Figure 6 illustrates this occurrence.
The metacognitive components expectation that all air-
craft should arrive at the ATC within 100 seconds of crossing
into the ATCs radar region fails since many of the aircraft
are circling while their nearest approach paths are full. It
responds by having the ATC change the strategy to the Free
Terminal strategy. Under the Free Terminal strategy aircraft
are cleared to approach from the nearest free terminal. This
allows the ATC to land aircraft without wasting as much
time, thereby fulfilling the stated expectation.
Figure 7 shows the result of the change in strategy from
Nearest Terminal to Free Terminal. Aircraft 2S7A2, 8LOOE

Figure 6. The southwestern aircraft: 8LOOE, 2S7A2 and EXKJI are made
to circle while QRUSA lands from the western approach path and MQJAX
approaches the southwestern approach path. Both northern approach paths
are empty.
Figure 7. All aircraft immediately head to approach paths as determined
under the Free Terminal Strategy.
and EXKJI are sent to approach paths that are available
instead of waiting at the edge of the radar range for their
closest approach paths to become available. When the distri-
bution of aircraft is spread out the metacognitive component
selects Free Terminal strategy; however as Figures 8 and 9
illustrate, with a more concentrated distribution of aircraft,
the metacognitive component selects the Queued Terminal
strategy.
Under the Nearest Terminal strategy, all but the first
aircraft in Figure 8 would be left circling while the approach
path was unavailable leading to very long flight durations
for the last flights to cross into the radar region. However
Figure 8. For illustration purposes all aircraft are created such that their
nearest approach is the western approach path.
with the Queued Terminal strategy five of the aircraft are
immediately sent to the closest approach path with the other
two circling for a smaller amount of time. This strategy
is best used when the concentration of aircraft is high for
multiple approach paths.
Figure 9. Queued Terminal strategy directs five aircraft at once to approach
by manipulating their flight speeds to avoid any collisions. Two aircraft must
wait for the first aircraft to land before one of the two is permitted in the
approach.
Figure 9 illustrates a high concentration of aircraft at
one approach path being successfully instructed under the
Queued Terminal strategy. Using flight speed manipulation
this strategy can provide efficient approach path instructions
during periods of high traffic.
Our approach to solving the problem of learning strategy
selection in a dynamic environment necessarily cannot rely
upon any explicit knowledge of the environment itself. The
metacognitive component therefore does not incorporate
hard coded heuristics for determining learning strategies
since dynamic environments can lead to any such heuristics
becoming obsolete from one moment to the next. Instead, the
metacognitive component looks solely at failed expectations
and determines in real-time how to respond based on its
array of available actions. Say, for instance, the approach
paths need to be changed. Perhaps the system is being
deployed at a different airport or some terminal has to go
down for maintenance. An ATC with metacognition is able
to treat this situation the same way it treats the others.
Aircraft that are sent to incorrect approach path locations
would begin to circle and their flight times increase. The
metacognitive component of the ATC notices that flight
times are outside of expected values and instructs the ATC
to create a new training data set that incorporates the new
approach path locations. This new strategy then fulfills the
required maximum flight time expectation.
IV. R ELATED W ORK
Metacognition has been shown to be a key ingredient
in problem solving and learning in the research in various
fields including psychology, education and linguistics. For
example, a study [3] involving college students and their
ability to predict the grades they would receive on exam-
inations based on their self awareness of their academic
strength or weakness, found that the more accurate the
students prediction the higher the students score. The
authors summarize that expert learners are also skillful at
metacognitive knowledge monitoring. The ability, or lack
thereof, of a problem solver such as a student to recognize
that their knowledge has come to a point that will allow
them to succeed at difficult tasks related to that knowledge
can predict future success. This relationship between self-
regulated learning and metacognitive knowledge monitoring
as witnessed in human beings is the motivation behind our
approach to regulating the learning for systems deployed in
dynamic environments.
In the field of artificial intelligence metacognition has
been applied in various ways to help systems learn. Cox
[4], [5] presents a computational theory of introspective
failure-driven multistrategy learning. The reasoning of an
agent is represented explicitly in knowledge structures called
Meta-XPs. The Meta-XPs explain how and why reasoning
fails. This knowledge is used by the learner to determine
the proper learning strategy. The theory is implemented in
a case-based reasoning system called Meta-AQUA [6], [7].
This system reads stories sentence by sentence and attempts
to understand them. If the knowledge base fails to provide
an explanation for a sentence, then a reasoning failure
is generated. When a reasoning failure occurs in Meta-
AQUA, the system creates new learning goals autonomously
based on the introspective analysis of its own successes
and failures at the performance task. A non linear planner
then selects a learning strategy based on the learning goal.
This approach to solving the problem of selecting the best
learning strategy is based on the machines prior knowledge
of what strategy best fits the determined goal. However in
certain dynamic environments the effectiveness of any one
strategy can change with time, so it is harder to explicitly
state the best strategy for each learning goal.
Raja and Lesser [8] describe a reinforcement learning
technique which allows agents to learn meta-level control
policies that govern decisions in multiagent environments.
The system learns a meta-level Markov Decision Process
(MDP) model that represents the system behavior for a
particular environment from a set of states, actions, transition
probabilities and a reward function. The system learns the
MDP model by making random decisions to collect state
transition probabilities. While these studies focus on learning
metacognitive control knowledge that can help in domain
activities like task scheduling, our research focuses on the
application of metacognition to self-regulate the acquisition
of new knowledge (discover new approach choosing strat-
egy) or revise existing knowledge (change current landing
strategy).
Fox and Leake [9], [10] use a model of the reasoning
process to derive expectations about the ideal reasoning
behavior of the system; the actual reasoning is compared
to this ideal to detect reasoning failures. Their system uses
introspective reasoning to monitor the retrieval process of a
case-based planner and detect the retrieval of inappropriate
cases. When retrieval problems occur, the explanations for
the failures are evaluated and these explanations are used to
update case indices in order to improve future performance.
This work is close in spirit to ours in the use of expectations
as a means to detect failures. While their system monitors
expectations to improve the performance of a case-based
planner, our system monitors expectations to improve the
performance of an agent situated in a dynamic environment.
The POIROT project [11] presents an architecture that
combines a set of machine learning approaches to learn
complex procedural models from a single demonstration in
a medical evacuation airlift planning domain. The overall
learning framework is based on goal-driven learning that
performs targeted searches for explanations when observa-
tions do not agree with the developing model and creates
new knowledge goals for the different learning components.
A meta-control learning moderator signals when to propose
learning hypotheses and when to evaluate them based on
the knowledge needs of the different components. While
POIROT focuses on learning a generalized hierarchical task
model from a demonstration of a sequence of web service
transactions, our work focuses on learning a task model that
is appropriate for the current environmental setting.
Cox and Raja ([12]) believe that at the meta-level, an
agent must have a model of itself to represent the products of
experience and to mediate the choices effectively at the ob-
ject level. Facing novel situations the successful agent must
learn from experience and create new strategies based upon
its self-perceived strengths and weaknesses. In this way,
the system becomes a complete cognitive system capable
of making decisions and having a clear understanding of
its own capabilities, its relationship to the problem and the
environment in which it exists.
V. C ONCLUSIONS AND F UTURE W ORK
At this point the metacognitive component is helpful in
choosing strategies that reduce expectation violations, but
it has a limited number of learning algorithms which it
can apply to the training data set. In the future we hope
to increase the number and type of classifiers available
for new strategy creation. To this end we are exploring
the Weka data mining and machine learning software [13]
from the University of Waikato. This software package
contains multiple machine learning algorithms incorporated
into a Java API and has independently produced solutions to
several training data sets. Integrating this software package
into the strategy learning module of the ATC will allow for
more diverse strategies yielding an increase in efficiency and
robustness for dynamic environments.
Also in the future we would like to remove the metacog-
nitive component and instead have the ATC communicate
with the Metacognitive Loop (MCL) software [14], [15],
[16], that reasons with the same metacognitive algorithms
but makes use of three generic ontologiesindications, fail-
ures and responsesto note anomalies, assess failures and
respond to the situation. MCL has been tested successfully
in other domains and its use in the air traffic control domain
will further test the generality of the MCL ontologies. MCL
uses a Bayesian network to select a proper response for
a particular input and only requires reconfiguration of the
fringe nodes when applied to different domains. This project
will be used to support further evolution of MCL in hopes
of creating a general reasoning system that can be applied in
any domain with minimal reconfiguration. Use of MCL will
allow the system access to a more complete decision making
system that uses more complex methods of evaluation to
learn proper reactions to expectation failures.
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