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 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
technical challenges required to design a dynamic grid computing architecture for a US
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.
- 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.
Most BREs today are deployed as “decision services”, and are used in “stateless” transactions to make “decisions” as a part of a business process. A CEP application is instead processing multiple event streams and sources over time, which requires a “stateful” rule service optimized for long running. This is an important distinction, as a stateful BRE for long-running processes needs to have failover support - the ability to cache its working memory for application restarting or distribution. And of course long-running processes need to be very particular over issues like memory handling - no memory leaks allowed!
The one, really big, difference between Complex Event Processing and traditional BRMS tools is that the former is loosely associated with EDA and decisions that are based on multiple events, whereas the latter is more associated with conventional request-reply SOA and automating decisions made in managed business processes.
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)