Modeling rule-based systems by stochastic programmed production systems

A new tool, the stochastic programmed production system (SPPS), is proposed for representing rules and control mechanisms in rule-based systems. This approach is based on the stochastic programmed grammars, and its peculiarity is both its well-formalized semantics and its ability to represent most reasoning and control methods used in expert systems today. Since the proposed method is not limited by the particular heuristic organization of the rule-based system it is modeling, the SPPS is more general than existing knowledge-domain-independent expert-system development languages and may help bring a better understanding of the theory of expert systems.