A new approach to detecting active rule confluence with exclusive rules during an indeterminable rule process

Abstract

Active rules have been employed for enhance self-reaction functionality, but how to detect their confluence property during an indeterminable rule process is intractable. If two rules without priority have been triggered at the same time, then anyone can be firstly chosen to execute at random and two different executive sequences will be arisen. An active rule set is confluence if and only if the same final database state appears no matter which executive sequence has been chosen to execute. The existing methods based on Rule Commutativity are no more effective to detect the confluence case if a rule set has exclusive rules and has no user-defined priority as they do not designed for rules without priority and they do not consider whether two different executive sequences for rules can be satisfied by the same database state. To address these problems, this work proposes the concepts of Exclusive Rule and Confluence Requirement with exclusive rules based on the conditional formula of an executive sequence. Then, a new algorithm for confluence detection is provided. The examples and theoretical analysis clearly show that the proposed method achieves much better detection performance when exclusive rules appear.