Estella; a facility for specifying behavioral constraint assertions in real-time rule-based systems

The authors have developed a powerful and efficient analysis methodology for a large class of rule-based EQL programs to determine whether a program in this class has bounded response time. In particular, the authors identified several sets of general behavioral constraint assertions: an EQL program which satisfies all constraints in one of these sets of assertions is guaranteed to have bounded response time. The authors enhance the applicability of this analysis technique by introducing a facility for the rule-based programmer to specify application-specific knowledge in the language Estella to validate the performance of an even wider range of programs. This facility can be viewed as a computer-aided software engineering tool for aiding the rapid prototyping and development of expert systems with guaranteed response time