On rule systems whose consistency can be locally maintained

Issue title: Intelligent Engineering Techniques for Knowledge Bases

Article type: Research Article

Authors: Narboni, Guy A.

Affiliations: Implexe, France. E-mail: r-d@implexe.fr

Abstract: We describe and analyse a constraint language for expressing logic rules on variables having a finite integer range. Our rules can involve linear arithmetic operations and comparisons to capture common engineering knowledge. They are capable of bidirectional inferences, using standard constraint reasoning techniques. Further, we show that for a restricted sub-language the basic propagation mechanism is complete. For systems in that class, local consistency implies global consistency. This noteworthy property can be instrumental in assessing the scalability of an Expert System, which in practice is a cause for concern with the growth of data. When the knowledge base passes a syntactic check, we can guarantee that its solution is search-free and therefore backtrack-free. By way of an illustration, we examine the worst case complexity of a product configuration example.

Keywords: Product modeling, knowledge engineering, rule-based reasoning, constraint processing, tractability

DOI: 10.3233/AIC-2012-0546

Journal: AI Communications, vol. 26, no. 1, pp. 67-77, 2013