Design and implementation of hardware for real-time intelligent agents

Creation of intelligent agents (IAs) became a basic trend in artificial intelligence in recent years. One of the most important requirements of such systems is real-time decision making when operating in open dynamic and uncertain environments. The efficiency of IAs in hard real-time applications can be improved by hardware support. Rule-based (production) knowledge is widely used in different subsystems of IAs to represent both domain and control knowledge. In this paper known approaches to the design and implementation of an inference processor for rule-based systems are considered and a novel one is presented. An approach is based on the concept of universal interpreter for rule-based systems and its implementation on the microprogram level. The design tasks and processor's architecture based on the Rete-network with multiple input /spl beta/-nodes are considered. A design methodology for such class of devices and corresponding software tool for design process support are described. An implementation of the processor using Altera programmable logic devices (PLD) and performance estimation results are presented in conclusion.