A Declarative Approach to Systems Development

The Business Rules Group has highlighted the importance of the ownership of business rules by business people. This calls for a business oriented view of business rules. Accordingly, we propose to introduce a Business Layer on top of the CIM layer of business rules that considers the essential nature of business rules, their properties and structure as well as inter-relationships between business rules. We propose a model that inhabits the business layer. This model provides (a) flat and hierarchical business rules, (b) business rules that operate on the state of an enterprise and cause state changes (c) temporal constraints and specification of long running and instantaneous business rules. Further, we develop a Business Rule Management system(BRMS) that, besides basic CRUD capability, allows construction of business rules from given ones. Our proposals are exemplified with a subset of the business rules of a Library.

Automating business rules management has provided significant benefits including greater control, improved flexibility, and the ability to rapidly deploy business rules across processes, information systems and channels (Web, legacy, wireless and otherwise). These benefits, in addition to trends in service orientated architectures, Web semantics, and business process management, have spawned an emerging business rules engine (BRE) market. Despite these developments, little has been published in MIS journals that examine the management of business rules management systems (BRMS) development and deployments. Making use of structuration research methods, we collect data from leading developers, end- users, researchers and thought-leaders from the industry. Data collection results revealed a business rules management lifecycle inclusive of these steps: align, capture, organize, author, distribute, test, apply, maintain. The contextual influences, actors, inputs, outputs and artifacts are identified in each step. Academic and managerial contributions, as well as recommendations for future research are provided.

Being a part of business process management (BPM) life cycle, business process modeling has found its place in information systems development (ISD) practices as well. At the same time, concepts of business vocabularies and rules are also the hot topics among BPM and ISD practitioners and academics. Nevertheless, in ISD, the integration of business process models with business vocabularies and rules is still not standardized and remains quite empiric. In this paper, basic aspects of the approach for business vocabularies’ extraction from business process models are presented. The approach is based on novel business level OMG standards “Business Process Model and Notation” (BPMN) and “Semantics for Business Vocabularies and Business Rules” (SBVR), thus contributing to OMG’s vision about Model-Driven Architecture (MDA) and to model-driven development in general.DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5755/j01.itc.42.2.2310

In June 2006, the Mortgage Industry Maintenance Organization (MISMO) began an initiative to help facilitate the electronic exchange of business rules between trading partners in the mortgage vertical. The Business Rules Exchange Workgroup (BREW) was subsequently formed to generate a charter and lead the adoption within the industry. BREW set out to create a proof-of concept (POC) to solve an often mentioned need for the exchange of rules: loan application pricing. A modified Production Rules (PR) extension to the working draft of the Rules Interchange Format (RIF) core design was developed by ILog and the well established MISMO schema was used as the ontology to share and execute a ruleset among ILOG JRules & JBOSS Rules in a distributed environment. A ruleset consisting of pricing rules were created using a decision table. ILOG Business Rules Engine(BRE) serialized these rules into a RIF ruleset. Using web services over HTTP , this ruleset was made available for consumption via web services allowing a client tool to consume the ruleset and push to a JBOSS Rules engine that had been exposed as a web service. Once the two systems shared the same ruleset, data payloads could then be sent to each rules engine for rule execution.

Target audience Application architect, software architect, developer In this chapter you will learn The major design issues for early business rule management system An overview of the major architectural choices for a business rules application An overview of the major design issues surrounding the integration of rule engines integration options An overview of the major design issues and best practices regarding reengineering legacy applications to introduce business rules Key points Business rule management is about more than authoring – and managing – executable rules: we need to manage the early deliverables (rule capture and analysis) and ensure proper traceability through the various stages of ABRD. Business rule applications can come in many shapes and sizes: rules are architecture-neutral. Most BRMSs offer many rule engine deployment options.The integration of rule-based decisioning into applications depends, in part, on the architecture of the application, and in part, on rule-specific architectural requirements. There are some proven patterns to reengineer the decisioning aspect of a legacy application using rule engines.

University information systems should flexibly and quickly adapt to variable requirements. This paper proposed an university information system implementation method based on business rule to achieves information systems adaptability. Based on steady business pool consisting of business granules and business objects, variable factors on the business object aggregate business granule operates are separated from information systems codes and stored as business rule, which is implemented through the corresponding business rule engines. Therefore, university information systems based on this method can adapt to variable requirements flexibly and quickly through configuring business rule. Experiments and examples are provided to evaluate the feasibility of the proposed method.

The subject of business rules is complex. We propose a 4-dimensional framework to better understand, communicate, and realize such rules in organizations and application systems. Our 4-dimensions are domain, that considers the role of business rules in business; system for properties of business rule management systems; application platform to understand support for business rules applications; and representation for expressing business rules. We derive these from work of the Business Rules Group, namely, the Business Rules Manifesto, Business Motivation Model, and Semantics of Business Vocabulary and business Rules, SBVR. We characterize our research position in terms of this framework.

This paper proposes a mapping technique for automatically translating rules expressed in a format based on natural language, i.e. Semantics of Business Vocabulary and Business Rules (SBVR) standard, into production rules that can be executed by a computer (i.e. Rule engine). The proposed approach achieves a twofold purpose: on the one hand non IT skilled people (i.e. Domain expert) can effectively focus on business rules definition by using statements in natural language, and on the other hand the IT staff will have to manage business rules in a format ready to be executed by a rule engine. The main goal is to overcome some weaknesses in the software development process that could produce inconsistencies between the domain requirements identification and the implemented software functionalities. An exhaustive analysis of the mapping technique is provided and a real case study is presented in order to prove the validity of our work.

The BizTalk Rule Engine (BRE) is often looked at as an ideal option for building out business rules in BizTalk Server. However, the actual use, maintenance, and deployment of the BRE is lacking in several aspects – and when you really want to have complete control over your business rules, with the added ability to easily modify, maintain, and test these rules – the best approach is to go with a custom rules engine solution, ideally based within SQL Server. The solution outlined in Chapter 6 “Solution: Receiving 834 Data” shows the inbound 834 data being sent to a business rules stored procedure. This chapter will outline the details behind this type of implementation, and will show how to work directly with the 834 XML data to apply business rule checks. The end result of the approach outlined in this chapter is a solution that is extremely easy to test (you can do all of your work from a SQL query window) and to maintain, especially post-production (modification of a stored procedure is all that is required – no updates to DLLs, BizTalk components, schemas, etc.).

Business Rules Management: Implementation and Evaluation

Business information required for applications and business processes is extracted using systems like business rule engines. Since the advent of Big Data, such rule engines are producing rules in a big quantity whereas more rules lead to more complexity in semantic analysis and understanding. This paper introduces a method to handle semantic complexity in rules and support automated generation of Resource Description Framework (RDF) metadata model of rules and such model is used to assist in querying and analysing Big Data. Practically, the dynamic changes in rules can be a source of conflict in rules stored in a repository. It is identified during the literature review that there is a need of a method that can semantically analyse rules and help business analysts in testing and validating the rules once a change is made in a rule. This paper presents a robust method that not only supports semantic analysis of rules but also generates RDF metadata model of rules and provide support of querying for the sake of semantic interpretation of the rules. The results of the experiments manifest that consistency checking of a set of big data rules is possible through automated tools.

11 - Populating Reference Data in the Repository

This paper describes how constraint solvers could serve as rule engines in the context of modern business decision management systems. Decision models are based on rule families oriented to business users and frequently represented as Excel decision tables. The proposed approach uses exactly the same representation of decision models as a rule engine. The developed Rule Solver loads a decision model from multiple Excel files, generates a constraint satisfaction problem, and then validates it for consistency, diagnosing possible conflicts. Finally, it solves the problem, delivering results using the same terms as business rules. In fact, a user may switch between a rule engine and a constraint solver without changing the rules themselves. Additionally, Rule Solver can find solutions or find an optimal decision when business rules only partially define a problem. Rule Solver is implemented as an advanced component of the popular open source business decision management system “OpenRules”.KeywordsDecision ModelRule FamilyConstraint SatisfactionRule EngineConstraint Solver

In the modern information management systems, business logic may change with the constantly changing of external environment, the traditional method of MIS only continuously modified the code to meet the needs of customers. But with the frequency of modification the clients will not accept the high maintenance cost, so there is an urgent need for a new approach to develop the MIS. In this condition, the rule-based method of software development came into being. The MIS in this paper is based on the J2EE platform, which used the JBoss rules as the inference engine by adding business rules to complete the separation between application components and business rule components, when business logic changes, it only needs to modify the rule that is depended on by business rule components, which does not have any impact on the system code. Facts proved that the system we designed behaved well in the aspect of availability, ease of operation and the speed of dealing with business logic.

Since today's enterprises must constantly adapt to rapidly changing external environment, it is necessary to be able to deal with variation and changing conditions in information systems (IS) development. This may be achieved by the use of multifractal IS development methodologies. Fractal approaches to some extent have already been tested in adaptive enterprise development, adaptive manufacturing systems development, and software development. This suggests that multifractal IS development, on the one hand, is appropriate, because the information system should properly reflect the business enterprise (in this case a fractal one) and, on the other hand, it is possible, because some elements of it have already been implemented. Development of multifractal IS aims at managing relative completeness by relative simplicity that has to be discovered in different subsystems that influence the development of the information system. This, in essence, implies the need of thorough analysis an understanding of business structures and processes to discover patterns useful for the identification of fractal features. Currently, only some guidelines for development of multifractal IS are derived from reported experiences of fractal systems development and the use of fractal approaches in other domains.