Transactional forward chaining: A functional approach

Abstract

Forward chaining is an effective method of reasoning used in production systems. Enhancing it with a transaction support enables rollback actions in productions and opens a way to define and perform reversible reasoning schemes. We present selected implementation details of a custom transactional production system with forward chaining, based on the Rete algorithm, realized in the functional programming style. We also discuss some design issues, like operating in multi-core environment, indexing, using immutable collections, and the Software Transactional Memory in Haskell. Additionally we give a prospect of exploiting partial knowledge stored in Rete network for the purpose of performing analysis in the absence of information.