Abstract
The match cost of Rete [8] increases significantly and approximately linearly with the number of rules [2]. A major part of that cost is the eager creation of cross products within the join nodes in an attempt to materialize rule instantiations. This paper builds on the idea of adaptive rules [1] using the unlinking of nodes, segments of nodes and rules to delay join attempts, which helps mitigate some aspects of the linear growth effect. By delaying the evaluation of a rule until after it’s linked and restricting the propagation to a single path, a lazy goal-driven evaluation behaviour is introduced. The algorithm also preserves node sharing by organising the network into segments and paths of segments; with memory now at node, segment and path levels. This paper presents the design and implementation of this work within the popular Open Source Drools rule engine. Drools also provides a baseline Rete implementation, without these enhancements, against which this work can be benchmarked. The evaluation of the results shows positive improvements over Rete, with no downsides.
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Proctor, M., Fusco, M., Sottara, D., Zimányi, T. (2018). Reducing the Cost of the Linear Growth Effect Using Adaptive Rules with Unlinking and Lazy Rule Evaluation. In: Panetto, H., Debruyne, C., Proper, H., Ardagna, C., Roman, D., Meersman, R. (eds) On the Move to Meaningful Internet Systems. OTM 2018 Conferences. OTM 2018. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11230. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-02671-4_38
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