An associative memory architecture for concurrent production systems

This paper presents a novel parallel architecture for production systems. It relies on modern associative memory techniques to construct an environment in which productions can be fired in parallel even before the actions of previously fired productions are fully processed. This approach is made possible by the use of the serializability criterion for correctness. An approximate solution for the rule partitioning problem is presented. Measurements of speedup obtained from a detailed event-driven simulator indicate the potential of this new architecture