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What commonsense knowledge do intelligent systems need, in order to recover from failures or deal with unexpected situations? It is impractical to represent predetermined solutions to deal with every unanticipated situation or provide predetermined fixes for all the different ways in which systems may fail. We contend that intelligent systems require only a finite set of anomaly-handling strategies to muddle through anomalous situations. We describe a generalized metacognition module that implements such a set of anomaly-handling strategies and that in principle can be attached to any host system to improve the robustness of that system. Several implemented studies are reported, that support our contention.

commonsense; robust intelligent systems; ontologies