Business Rules
INFS 770 – KM for E-Business
Professor L. Kerschberg
Spring 2004
Outline of Presentation
Why study them?
What are business rules?
How do we represent them?
Sources of business rules.
Business Rule Taxonomies
Commercial Products
Why Study Business Rules
High-level declarative specification of rules
allow:
Better communication and understanding,
Efficient management, improved control and
quality, better consistency, phased evolution, and
risk management.
Repository-based centralized rule storage
allows for better control, update, verification,
evolution and transformation to target
systems.
What are Business Rules
Rules capture the What, How and Why of an
organization:
What: The information used by the organization
How: The activities performed
Why: The rules that govern the organization
Rules can be used to represent:
Activities, events and triggers, state information,
Constraints (quality, consistency, integrity, etc.),
Policies and laws governing the organization,
Expertise of key people in the organization, and
Data as knowledge (culled via data mining).
Sources of Business Rules
Company policies, conditions and procedures
that must be satisfied,
External policies such as government
regulations, tax code, security policy and
safety requirements,
Transaction consistency and integrity
constraints,
Examples for E-Business:
Customer preferences, supplier contractual terms,
Configuration rules for product lines, special sales
offers, customer transaction processing.
Why identify rules?
Benefits of Business Rules
They improve communication and
understanding
They help get requirements right first time
They centralize knowledge
They reduce development time and cost
They enable faster maintenance and
enhancement
Business Rule Taxonomies
James Odell
Constraint:
State Constraint
Transition
Event/action
Derivation
Computation
Inference
Business Rule Taxonomies
GUIDE Study of Business Rules
Specification of a meta-model for rules.
High-level view of terms, facts, rules,
constraints, regulations.
Now under the Business Rules
Consortium.
Business Rule Taxonomies
Chris Date
Database Integrity Constraints
Domain (datatype)
Column (attribute)
Table (relationship variable)
Database (logical database)
Business Rule Taxonomies
Ron Ross: Periodic Table of Rules
I. Instance Verifiers
II. Type Verifiers
III. Position Verifiers
IV. Functional Verifiers
V. Comparative Verifiers
VI. Mathematical Evaluators
VII. Projection Controllers
Commercial Products
Versata – www.versata.com
Versata’s E-Business Automation System is an
approach that provides accelerated methods for
specifying:
The business rules–logic–associated with transactional
e-business applications, and
The e-business processes that carry the transactional
information to the systems and people who need to touch
the information.
Visit the Versata knowledge base of technical
Papers, discussion groups, etc.
Versata Business Rules
Validation
Datatype, Domain of values, Reference table
Derivation
Formula or Inference
Constraint
State Transition enabler or enforcer
Event/Action
Automatic Triggers
Relationship
Referential Integrity
Versata PDX…
Proper Length, N-up Scalar
Caption Location, Forms
Required indicator
Tab Sheets
(+ Scalar Groups)
Conditional
Field Hide,
Graphics
Conditional Groups – Conditional
Transitions with own Grid Row
(and Set Field) caption (s) Color
Combo Picks,
Pop-up Picks &
Error Messages
Confidential 13
Commercial Products
Blaze Advisor and Blaze Expert by Blaze
Software (formerly Neuron Data): information
at www.blazesoft.com
Blaze Advisor Solutions Suite includes support for
the input and change of business rules "on the fly"
using a combination of "near natural language"
and templates intended for use by business users.
Blaze Expert is a business rule solution for building
expert systems and rule-powered applications.
Their site provides product information and news
releases on their product line. White papers are
available on request.
Commercial Products
Platinum Aion, now part of Computer
Associates.
http://www.platinum.com/products/appdev/aio
n_ps.htm
“PLATINUM Aion is the leading rule-based
development tool on the market today,
combining powerful business rule and object
oriented technologies to create and maintain
complex, knowledge-intensive applications.”
Commercial Products
BRS RuleTrack by Business Rule Solutions,
LLC and Framework Software, Inc.: product
information at www.BRSolutions.com
BRS RuleTrackTM is an automated tool for
recording and organizing business rules from the
business perspective (and independent of
particular implementation environments). The tool
provides direct support for rule management. It
can be used wherever rules need to be managed.
Their site provides product information on this,
and other rule-related, products and publications.
Commercial Products
HOW by Riverton Software: information at
www.riverton.com/
HOW is a family of products for component-based
development / deployment. The HOW Modeling
Edition supports business-oriented analysis and
design. Its "Business Rule Builder" component
supports deriving business rules from use cases
and linking the rules to the business objects that
implement them. This site provides product
information and customer case studies.
Commercial Products
ILOG Rules by ILOG: information at
www.ilog.com/products/rules/
ILOG Rules is a rules engine that enables
applications to incorporate dynamic rules
seamlessly to control real time data flows and
react instantly. The site provides product
information, a third-party analyst's report on the
product, and their own white paper providing a
technical overview of the product.
Commercial Products
USoft Developer by USoft: information
at www.usoft.com
USoft's tools add a business rules engine to
existing database applications and
development tools. Their site provides
product information and white papers on
business rules technology.