The book presents logical foundations for rule-based systems, as seen by the Author. An attempt has been made to provide an in-depth discussion of logical and other aspects of such systems, including languages for knowledge representation, inference mechanisms, inference control, design and verification. The ultimate goal was to provide a deeper theoretical insight into the nature of rule-based systems and put together the most complete presentation including details so frequently skipped in typical textbooks. The main parts present material on: • logical foundations of rule-based systems (Part I); • principles of rule-based systems structures, knowledge representation languages, inference and inference control (Part II); • verification of formal properties of rule-based systems (Part III); • design methodology for efficient development of such systems (Part IV).

The book may be useful to potentially wide audience, but it is aimed at providing specific knowledge for graduate, post-graduate and Ph.D. students, as well as knowledge engineers and research workers involved in the domain of AI. It also constitutes a summary of the Author’s research and experience gathered through several years of his research work.