Inferencing Overview

This chapter presents an overview of CA Rule Engine inferencing. The presentation is at a conceptual level. For a fuller description of inferencing, refer to the Engine Behavior Specification. For clarity, this document often employs an infix-style notation for illustrating rule logic. For a human reader, this notation is easier to follow than is the corresponding raw RDL (XML) code. Note that this infix-style notation is for illustrative purposes only - and that the CA Rule Engine Compiler supports only RDL as a textual language for defining rulebases.

The end-user must first apply CA Rule Engine administrative services to compile RDL-coded rulebases into binary rulebases; and then applies CA Rule Engine runtime services to invoke the inference engine (Engine) for rule processing.

This section contains the following topics:

Fundamental Notions

Agenda Management

Rule Reactivity

Discretely Reactive Rules

Special Handling

Forward Chaining

Sub-Inferencing