Rule Firing With Metarules

We describe a technique for the of production rules firing in an object-oriented setting. This technique is based on the separation of rules from ordinary domain rules. Control rules operate on control which are created during the reasoning process of the rule base under control. They constitute a separate and independent rule base which contains a declarative specification of the strategy. Control objects build up an inheritance hierarchy and the associated metabase is constructed via rule base inheritance in a hierarchical manner which parallels the taxonomy of object classes.