We begin a study of optimisation techniques that apply to compiling Lafont’s interaction nets. Interaction nets are a graph rewriting system. Because of their linear logic foundation, they give a refined view of computation. They have been used to implement programming languages based on the lambda-calculus. Since the left-hand sides of rewrite rules are pairs of agents, matching is efficient. However, rule application can be costly since the right-hand sides are unrestricted. Several compilers for interaction nets have been proposed, but optimisation techniques for rule optimisation have not been discussed. Here we recall one compilation method for interaction rules and study an optimisation based on the graph edit algorithm to efficiently build the right-hand side of a rule with the least number of steps. This work is part of a considerable research effort to build compilers based on interaction nets.