Inference engine

Computer program that derives answers from a knowledge base. It is used to reason regarding the information in the knowledge base, and obtain conclusions from it. This computer program has three parts: an interpreter that executes the chosen agenda items by applying the base rules, a scheduler that maintains control over the agenda, and a consistency enforcer that maintains a consistent representation of the emerging solution. The inference engine also has three action states: match rules – all of the rules that are satisfied by the current contents of the data store are found, select rules where a selection strategy to determine which rules will actually be executed is applied and, finally, execute rules where the selected rules, with the instantiation's data items as parameters, are executed.