Key Considerations

How do you get started with Business Rule Management?

1. Not all rule engines are created equal.

• Not only do their representation techniques differ, but also how they should be leveraged and applied are different.

2. Business process management systems provide rich routing rules and event rules that help orchestrate how work gets triggered and resolved.
3. Inference-based rule engines conduct decisions based on analyzing a dependency network of related data and facts.

• This type of rule execution is used for complex rule resolution at runtime. It’s capable of doing both forward and backward chaining, also known as goal seeking.

4. Event-based BREs are for correlating complex business events to derive a decision or action. It applies event listeners and triggers that can be embedded into flows,

• BAM technology, back-end systems and more.

5. Action Item: First, thoroughly understand your rule use case before making a decision on your shortlist.

• Understanding how you are going to use rules will dictate from which category of rule technology you should select vendors.

Types of rules

• Branching rules
• Routing rules
• Simple event rules
• Goal – Fact – Decision – Decision
• Fact – Fact – Fact – and – Decision

Inference-Based Business Rule Engine

• Fires rules based on terms and facts
• Forward chaining
• Backward chaining

Event-Based Business Rule Engine

• Complex event processing
• Fires based on correlating business and system events
• Event listeners