Logical Foundations for Rule-Based Systems

Thinking in terms of facts and rules is perhaps one of the most common ways of approaching problem de?nition and problem solving both in everyday life and under more formal circumstances. The best known set of rules, the Ten Commandments have been accompanying us since the times of Moses; the Decalogue proved to be simple but powerful, concise and universal. It is logically consistent and complete. There are also many other attempts to impose rule-based regulations in almost all areas of life, including professional work, education, medical services, taxes, etc. Some most typical examples may include various codes (e.g. legal or tra?c code), regulations (especially military ones), and many systems of customary or informal rules. The universal nature of rule-based formulation of behavior or inference principles follows from the concept of rules being a simple and intuitive yet powerful concept of very high expressive power. Moreover, rules as such encode in fact functional aspects of behavior and can be used for modeling numerous phenomena.

The book presents logical foundations for rule-based systems, as seen by the Author. An attempt has been made to provide an in-depth discussion of logical and other aspects of such systems, including languages for knowledge representation, inference mechanisms, inference control, design and verification. The ultimate goal was to provide a deeper theoretical insight into the nature of rule-based systems and put together the most complete presentation including details so frequently skipped in typical textbooks. The main parts present material on: • logical foundations of rule-based systems (Part I); • principles of rule-based systems structures, knowledge representation languages, inference and inference control (Part II); • verification of formal properties of rule-based systems (Part III); • design methodology for efficient development of such systems (Part IV).

The book may be useful to potentially wide audience, but it is aimed at providing specific knowledge for graduate, post-graduate and Ph.D. students, as well as knowledge engineers and research workers involved in the domain of AI. It also constitutes a summary of the Author’s research and experience gathered through several years of his research work.