Adaptive response systems are defined and used to illustrate adaptive techniques in production system construction.

A learning paradigm is described with in the framework of adaptive response systems, and is applied to a simple rote learning task...

Recently-developed techniques have improved the performance of production systems several times over. However, these techniques are not yet adequate for continuous problem solving in a dynamically changing environment. To achieve adaptive real-time performance in such environments, we use an organization of distributed production system agents, rather than a single monolithic production system, to solve problems. Organization self-design is performed to satisfy real-time constraints and to adapt to changing resource requirements. When overloaded, individual agents decompose themselves to increase parallelism, and when the load lightens the agents compose with each other to free hardware resources. In addition to increased performance, generalizations of our composition/decomposition approach provide several new directions for organization self-design, a pressing concern in Distributed AI.

Adaptive response systems are defined and used to illustrate adaptive techniques in production system construction. A learning paradigm is described within the framework of adaptive response systems, and is applied to a simple rote learning task, a nonsense syllable association and discrimination task, and a serial pattern acquisition task. It is shown that with the appropriate production building mechanism, all three tasks can be solved using similar production system learning techniques. The adaptive response systems are quite parsimonious; that is, the learning program is represented in exactly the same fashion as the information being learned. Both are represented as production rules in a single production system. This eliminates the need for two types of control in the system; one for activating the learning mechanism and another for accessing the information learned.