MECHANISMS FOR TEMPORAL LOGIC IMPLEMENTATION IN RULE-BASED SYSTEMS

Rule-based systems are more and more important in middleware architectures and distributed applications. Although support for temporal constructs would be very conveniant for many domains, implementations are not yet widespread. This paper is about several methods to expand rule-based systems and the commonly used RETE algorithm in order to gain basic support for temporal logic constructs. A few promising approaches are discussed and compared with respect to efficiency, memory usage, and implemetation details. The paper is limited on the discussion of temporal logics in rule-based systems and does not take temporal logic in other contexts into account.