A New Scheme for Verifying Rule-Based Systems by Using Net-Invariants of Petri Nets

Abstract

In the large-scale rule-based systems, it is assumed that addition, deletion, or changes of rules are frequently carried out. Thus, various contradiction or fatal errors would be caused, even if only a few modifications are carried out, where such kind of errors requires to be verified for maintaining the right reasoning. In this paper, we propose a new scheme for verifying rule-based systems using Petri nets. Especially, considering the property of Transition-invariant (T-invariant), the simple method of detecting structural errors in rule-based systems is clarified. That is to say, some reasoning processes are regarded as various series of rules, which are represented by a set of multiple vectors of T-invariant. Using these vectors, the algorithm for detecting what kind of errors exists in the reasoning processes is derived, where the structural errors of the rule set considering here are the series of rules which should not exist on the rule set, and are indispensable to be searched, detected and corrected.