Automatic Versus Controlled Processing: An Architecture for Real Time Production Systems

Many intelligent systems must respond to sensory data or critical environmental conditions in fixed, predictable time. Rule-based systems, including those based on the efficient Rete matching algorithm, cannot guarantee this result. Improvement in execution-time effiency is not all that is needed here; it is important to ensure constant, 0(1) time limits for portions of the matching process. Our approach is inspired by two observations about human performance. First, cognitive psychologists distinguish between automatic and controlled processing. Analogously, we partition the matching process across two networks.