Methods and effectiveness of parallel rule firing

Implementation methods for parallel rule firing, where multiple production rules are fired simultaneously in each production cycle, are presented. The methods include interference analysis (that detects cases where a parallel firing result is different from those of sequential firings of the same rules in any order), a parallel firing algorithm (that realizes the parallel firing on multiprocessor architectures) and parallel programming environment (that provides language facilities and a parallel firing simulator). The effectiveness of the parallel rule firing for several production system applications is evaluated. Results show that the degree of concurrency can be increased by a factor of 2 to 9. The sources of parallelism are investigated, based on the evaluation results