Characterizing the parallelism in rule-based expert systems
Robert J. Douglass · University of North Texas Digital Library (University of North Texas) · 1984
A brief review of two classes of rule-based expert systems is presented, followed by a detailed analysis of potential sources of parallelism at the production or rule level, the subrule level (including match, select, and act parallelism), and at the search level (including AND, OR, and stream parallelism). The potential amount of parallelism from each source is discussed and characterized in terms of its granularity, inherent serial constraints, efficiency, speedup, dynamic behavior, and communication volume, frequency, and topology. Subrule parallelism will yield, at best, two- to tenfold speedup, and rule level parallelism will yield a modest speedup on the order of 5 to 10 times. Rule level can be combined with OR, AND, and stream parallelism in many instances to yield further parallel speedups.