A specialized match algorithm called Uni-Rete is reported. Uni-Rete is a specialization of the widely used Rete match algorithm to unique attributes. Performance results for Uni-Rete indicate over tenfold speedup with respect to Rete. The implications of Uni-Rete for non-unique-attribute systems are discussed.>

Large production systems (rule-based systems) continue to suffer from extremely slow execution which limits their utility in practical applications as well as in research settings. Most investigations in speeding up these systems have focused on match (or knowledge-search) parallelism. Although good speed-ups have been achieved in this process, these investigations have revealed the limitations on the total speed-up available from this source. This limited speed-up is insufficient to alleviate the problem of slow execution in large-scale production system implementations. Such large-scale systems are expected to increase as researchers develop increasingly more competent production systems.