The Portable Inference Engine: Fitting Significant Expertise Into Small Systems

The Portable Inference Engine (PIE) is the nucleus of an expert system that allows the segmentation of rules in order to utilize large knowledge bases in limited memory. If the expert-systems rules can be divided into segments of highly related rules with little interaction among those segments, such knowledge-base segments can then be paged in and out of memory on demand. PIE gathers information by querying the user and executing external procedures in order to conclude goals.