Design and Simulation of a Parallel Inference Machine Architecture for Rule Based Systems

Abstract This paper presents an architecture of the inference machine for a rule based expert system. The paper, structured around the concept of “inference flow graphs”, is aimed at incorporating parallelism in antecedent matching to find out the firable rules as well as firing more than one rule simultaneously, whenever required. Through this architecture, the number of comparisons required during the antecedent matching phase, is significantly reduced. The flow of inferencing can also proceed in a pipelined manner resulting in faster inferences.