HIGHLY PARALLEL EXECUTION OF PRODUCTION SYSTEMS - A MODEL, ALGORITHMS AND ARCHITECTURE

This paper presents a new parallel processing scheme called DYNAMIC-JOIN for OPS5-like production systems along with associated parallel algorithms, a parallel architecture and simulation results from a number of production systems. The main motivation behind DYNAMIC-JOIN is to reduce the variations in the processing time requirements and improve limited production level parallelism. For this, the model employs some redundancy that allows the processing of a production to be divided into units of small granularity each of which can be processed in parallel. As a consequence in addition to production level parallelism where a set of relevant productions are processed in parallel, a second level of parallelism can be exploited. After a detailed description of the model proposed, the paper presents algorithms for processing productions with DYNAMIC-JOIN, along with a discussion of various issues and possible disadvantages. Subsequently, the paper presents a parallel processor architecture that can implement DYNAMIC-JOIN, along with simulation results from real production systems.