Towards a Fully Parallel Reason Maintenance System

A truth maintenance system (TMS) is an AI system used to monitor consistency of information in a knowledge base. A TMS may be necessary when non-monotonic reasoning is used since incorrect assumptions can lead to contradictory conclusions. The Reason Maintenance System (RMS), a specific TMS first described by Doyle [5],[6], is used along with an inference engine (IE), or problem solver, to maintain a consistent set of beliefs and inferences. We have developed a parallel version of the RMS for correctly assigning IN or OUT states to each believe node [7]. This algorithm uses diffusing computation [4] to assign the status to a node. In this paper we will further parallelize the RMS by superimposing a locking mechanism on the RMS to have simultaneous status assignment computations performed. Also, we will address how contradiction handling can be executed in parallel and the effect on the RMS when a parallel contradiction handler is incorporated