A network approach to integrity maintenance of active object bases

The paper describes an asynchronous, network based algorithm to enforce integrity control on top of active objects. It proposes that the control of each active object be expressed as production rules, and the production rules associated with the objects be compiled into a network so that they can be evaluated collectively using databased operations. To maintain correctness and exploit all possible parallelism, each token is time stamped and can be processed asynchronously. To handle rollbacks, a lazy cancellation approach is used. It is shown that, in most cases, the performance of the network approach is superior to that of the fully distributed object oriented approach.