Author(s)

J.W. Davidson & I.C. Goulter

Abstract

A new type of production system in which a rule base evolves and self- organizes through experimentation with sample problems is described. Three mechanisms referred to as learning, cheating and forgetting are involved in this autonomous learning and self-organizing process and act on the rule base by adding or removing rules. Learning and cheating add rules on the basis of local optima generated by the production system's irrevocable best-first control strategy and randomized search strategy. Forgetting removes rules found to be behaving ineffectively. Several scenarios are presented to illustrate how the three mechanisms work together. The use of the system for design of layouts for rectilinear gas and water distribution networks is described. Introduction This paper describes some of the characteristics of production systems t

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