I got an update on the Oracle Business Rules product recently. Oracle is an interesting company - they have the components of decision management but do not yet have them under a single umbrella. For instance, they have in-database data mining (blogged about here), the Real Time Decisions (RTD) engine, event processing rules and so on. Anyway, this update was on business rules.
Bruce makes an interesting comment on business rules too: that “routing logic in process gateways” are not “business rules”. That doesn’t really make sense: for sure some gateways will be process-housekeeping decisions of little interest to the business user, but others will surely embed business-critical decisions. On the other hand, it has long been acknowledged that a best practice for BPM is to delegate such business decisions to a managed decision service - hence the explicit new business rule (aka decision) task in BPMN 2.0. And,in the CEP world, for tools like TIBCO BusinessEvents to invoke a decision managed by its Decision Manager tool.
The main characteristic to be aware of in these tools is that BE is primarily rule-based (using an embedded rule engine), whereas BW and iProcess are orchestration / flow engines. In BE we can use a state diagram to indicate a sequence of states which may define what process / rules apply, but this is really just another way of specifying a particular type of rules (i.e. state transition rules).
The main advantages to specifying behavior as declarative rules are:
Handling complex, event-driven behavior and choreography
Iterative development, rule-by-rule
The main advantages of flow diagrams and BPMN-type models are:
Ease of understanding (especially for simpler process routes)
Process paths are pre-determined and therefore deemed guaranteeable.
In combination these tools provide many of the IT capabilities required in an organization. For example, a business automation task uses BW to consolidate information from multiple existing sources, with human business processes for tasks such as process exceptions managed by iProcess. BE is used to consolidate (complex) events from systems to provide business information, or feed into or drive both BW and iProcess, and also monitors end-to-end system and case performance.
The success of Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) has created the foundation for information
and service sharing across application and organizational boundaries. Through the use of SOA,
organizations are demanding solutions that provide vast scalability, increased reusability of
business services, and greater efficiency of computing resources. More importantly,
organizations need agile architectures that can adapt to rapidly changing business requirements
without the long development cycles that are typically associated with these efforts. Event-Driven
Architecture (EDA) has emerged to provide more sophisticated capabilities that address these
dynamic environments. EDA enables business agility by empowering software engineers with
complex processing techniques to develop substantial functionality in days or weeks rather than
months or years. As a result, EDA is positioned to enhance the business value of SOA.
The purpose of this white paper is to describe the approach employed to overcome the significant
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government program. The program required optimization of the overall business process while
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across the enterprise.
Incanto can be implemented to solve the following kinds of decision making problems:
Problems where the expert rule set is large or complex. Incanto is especially suited to managing complexity.
Problems where the rules change frequently. Incanto`s testing capabilities mean amended rule sets can be introduced swiftly and with confidence.
Problems where the expert rules set needs to be applied to large volumes of data.
Where all these conditions apply Incanto is probably the only good answer in the market at present.
Multiple channels and types of events…
… executing in multiple Inference Agents (Event Processing Agents on an Event Processing Network)…
… where Events drive Production Rules with associated (shared) data…
… and event patterns (complex events) are derived from the simple events and also drive Production Rules via inferencing…
… to lead to “real-time” decisions.
JT has posted his view on rules and decisions and how they relate. Given that James talks more about services than events, I thought it would be worth reviewing his post from both a Complex Event Processing and a TIBCO BusinessEvents event processing platform perspective.
”Decision Services:
Support business processes by making the business decisions that allow a process to continue.
Support event processing systems by adding business decisions to event correlation decisions (they are often called Decision Agents in this context).
Allow crucial and high-maintenance parts of legacy enterprise applications to be externalized for reuse and agility.
Can be plugged into a variety of systems using Enterprise Service Bus approaches.”
- leave anything related to transport, communication to other layers- use this revised CEP to express and execute event-relevant logic, the purpose of which is to translate the ambient events into relevant business events- have these business events trigger business processes (however lightweight you want to make them)- have these business processes invoke decision services implemented through decision management to decide what they should be doing at every step- have the business processes invoke action services to execute the actions decided by the decision services- all the while generating business events or ambient events- etc.
- First, event management is primarily about the identification and generation of business events from the ambient events. Similar to what Carole-Ann and I had written in previous posts.- Second, IBM wants to introduce high level EPLs to express the logic for that processing that are business-centric, something very similar to what Business Rules Languages and approaches are in the business rules management area.
J. Schiefer, S. Rozsnyai, C. Rauscher, and G. Saurer. DEBS '07: Proceedings of the 2007 inaugural international conference on Distributed event-based systems, page 198--205. New York, NY, USA, ACM, (2007)