Business Rules

1
Business Rules

• INFS 770 KM for E-Business
• Professor L. Kerschberg
• Spring 2004

2
Outline of Presentation

• Why study them?
• What are business rules?
• How do we represent them?
• Sources of business rules.
• Business Rule Taxonomies
• Commercial Products

3
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.

4
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).

5
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.

6
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

7
Business Rule Taxonomies

• James Odell
• Constraint
• State Constraint
• Transition
• Event/action
• Derivation
• Computation
• Inference

8
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.

9
Business Rule Taxonomies

• Chris Date
• Database Integrity Constraints
• Domain (datatype)
• Column (attribute)
• Table (relationship variable)
• Database (logical database)

10
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

11
Commercial Products

• Versata www.versata.com
• Versatas E-Business Automation System is an
  approach that provides accelerated methods for
  specifying
• The business ruleslogicassociated 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.

12
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

13
Versata PDX
Confidential
13
14
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.

15
Commercial Products

• Platinum Aion, now part of Computer Associates.
• http//www.platinum.com/products/appdev/aion_ps.ht
  m
• 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.

16
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.

17
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.

18
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.

19
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.