Abstract
Production systems are declarative, in that they do not explicitly specify the control flow. Yet, the concept of a production system does not include the definition of a given control strategy. The control between rules in a production rule program is, in practice, defined by each implementation of a production rule engine. Engines have traditionally been implemented using the Rete algorithm. Since the turn of the century, however, production systems have evolved into industrial products known as Business Rules Management Systems (BRMS). BRMS have introduced new compilation and execution schemes, which are often called sequential in contrast with the incremental behavior of Rete. This change in execution scheme came with a change in semantics for rule programs. In this paper, we propose a formal description of the execution of production rule programs. Existing descriptions either ignore the control strategy, or assume a Rete semantics. Ours isolates the handling of rule eligibility in the control strategy, which allows us to describe the sequential execution semantics of rule programs, as well as the Rete semantics, and others.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
Baralis, E., Widom, J.: An algebraic approach to rule analysis in expert database systems. In: Bocca, J.B., Jarke, M., Zaniolo, C. (eds.) VLDB, pp. 475–486. Morgan Kaufmann (1994)
Berstel, B., Leconte, M.: Using constraints to verify properties of rule programs. In: Proceedings of the 2010 Third International Conference on Software Testing, Verification, and Validation Workshops, ICSTW 2010, pp. 349–354. IEEE Computer Society (2010)
Brownston, L., Farrell, R., Kant, E., Martin, N.: Programming Expert Systems in OPS5: An Introduction to Rule-Based Programming. Addison-Wesley, Boston (1985)
de Bruijn, J., Rezk, M.: A Logic Based Approach to the Static Analysis of Production Systems. In: Polleres, A., Swift, T. (eds.) RR 2009. LNCS, vol. 5837, pp. 254–268. Springer, Heidelberg (2009)
Cheng, A.M.K., Tsai, H.-Y.: A graph-based approach for timing analysis and refinement of OPS5 knowledge-based systems. IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering 16(2), 271–288 (2004)
Cirstea, H., Kirchner, C., Moossen, M., Moreau, P.É.: Production systems and Rete algorithm formalisation. Research report, LORIA, Nancy (September 2004), http://hal.inria.fr/inria-00280938/PDF/rete.formalisation.pdf
Corticon Business Rules Management System, http://www.corticon.com/Products/Business-Rules-Management-System.php
Damásio, C.V., Alferes, J.J., Leite, J.: Declarative Semantics for the Rule Interchange Format Production Rule Dialect. In: Patel-Schneider, P.F., Pan, Y., Hitzler, P., Mika, P., Zhang, L., Pan, J.Z., Horrocks, I., Glimm, B. (eds.) ISWC 2010, Part I. LNCS, vol. 6496, pp. 798–813. Springer, Heidelberg (2010)
Fages, F., Lissajoux, R.: Sémantique opérationnelle et compilation des systèmes de production. Revue d’Intelligence Artificielle 6(4), 431–456 (1992)
Fair, Isaac, and Company: High-volume batch processing with Blaze Advisor. Computer World U.K. (March 2007), http://www.computerworlduk.com/white-paper/business-process/5092/high-volume-batch-processing-with-blaze-advisor/
FICOTM Blaze Advisor ®, http://www.fico.com/en/Products/DMTools/Pages/FICO-Blaze-Advisor-System.aspx
Floyd, R.W.: A descriptive language for symbol manipulation. Journal of the ACM 8(4), 579–584 (1961)
Forgy, C.: OPS5 User’s manual. Tech. Rep. CMU-CS-81-135, Carnegie-Mellon University, Pittsburgh (July 1981)
Forgy, C.: Rete: A fast algorithm for the many patterns/many objects match problem. Artificial Intelligence 19(1), 17–37 (1982)
Hanson, E., Hasan, M.S.: Gator: An optimized discrimination network for active database rule condition testing. Tech. Rep. TR93-036, University of Florida (1993)
IBM Websphere Operational Decision Management, http://www.ibm.com/software/websphere/products/business-rule-management
IBM: IBM Websphere Operational Decision Management v7.5 User’s Manual (2011), http://publib.boulder.ibm.com/infocenter/dmanager/v7r5/
McCoy, D.W., Sinur, J.: Achieving Agility: The Agile Power of Business Rules. Gartner (2006), http://www.gartner.com/DisplayDocument?doc_cd=138218
Mettrey, W.: A comparative evaluation of expert system tools. Computer 24, 19–31 (1991)
Miranker, D.P.: TREAT: A better match algorithm for AI production systems. In: Proceedings of the Sixth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence, AAAI 1987, vol. 1, pp. 42–47. AAAI Press (1987)
Oracle Business Rules, http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/middleware/business-rules/overview
Red Hat: JBoss Enterprise BRMS, http://www.jboss.com/products/platforms/brms
Red Hat: Drools Expert User Guide (2010), http://downloads.jboss.com/drools/docs/5.1.1.34858.FINAL/drools-expert/html_single/index.html#d0e2086
Rosenthal, D.: Adding meta rules to OPS5: A proposed extension. ACM SIGPLAN Notices 20(10), 79–86 (1985)
de Sainte Marie, C., Hallmark, G., Paschke, A.: Rule Interchange Format, Production Rule Dialect. Recommendation, W3C (2010), http://www.w3.org/TR/rif-prd/
SAP NetWeaver Business Rules Management, http://www.sap.com/platform/netweaver/components/brm/index.epx
Schmolze, J.G., Snyder, W.: Detecting redundancy among production rules using term rewrite semantics. Knowledge-Based Systems 12(1–2), 3–11 (1999)
Soloway, E., Bachant, J., Jensen, K.: Assessing the maintainability of XCON-in-RIME: Coping with the problems of a VERY large rule-base. In: AAAI, pp. 824–829 (1987)
Taylor, J., Raden, N.: Smart (enough) systems: How to deliver competitive advantage by automating the decisions hidden in your business. Prentice Hall, Upper Saddle River (2007)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2012 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Berstel-Da Silva, B. (2012). Formalizing Both Refraction-Based and Sequential Executions of Production Rule Programs. In: Bikakis, A., Giurca, A. (eds) Rules on the Web: Research and Applications. RuleML 2012. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 7438. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-32689-9_5
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-32689-9_5
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-642-32688-2
Online ISBN: 978-3-642-32689-9
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)