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Business Rules Management Systems

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Business Rules Management Systems BUSINESS RULES MANAGEMENT SYSTEMS Cliffred van Velzen Table of Contents 1. Introduction ...................................................................................................................... 3 1.1. Business rule management systems .............................................................................. 3 1.2. Research questions .............................................................................................................. 5 1.3. Methodology ........................................................................................................................... 5 2. Business Rules .................................................................................................................. 7 2.1. What are business rules? ................................................................................................... 7 2.2. Why should we care? ......................................................................................................... 10 2.3. Business Rule Approach ................................................................................................... 12 2.4. Concluding remarks ........................................................................................................... 13 3. Business rules management systems .................................................................... 14 3.1. History .................................................................................................................................... 14 3.2. Business rules management systems .......................................................................... 21 3.3. Suitability .............................................................................................................................. 23 3.4. Rule engines ......................................................................................................................... 25 3.5. Extracting business rules ................................................................................................. 32 3.6. Expressing business rules ................................................................................................ 33 3.7. Closing words ....................................................................................................................... 36 4. Related Developments ................................................................................................ 38 4.1. Service Oriented Architecture ........................................................................................ 38 4.2. Ontologies ............................................................................................................................. 42 4.3. Compliance ............................................................................................................................ 44 4.4. Concluding remarks ........................................................................................................... 45 5. BRMS’s in practice ........................................................................................................ 46 6. Use case ............................................................................................................................ 49 6.1. Method .................................................................................................................................... 49 6.2. Scenario .................................................................................................................................. 52 6.3. Evaluation ............................................................................................................................. 53 7. Results .............................................................................................................................. 72 7.1. Requirements ....................................................................................................................... 72 7.2. Guidelines .............................................................................................................................. 74 8. Conclusion ....................................................................................................................... 77 8.1. Findings .................................................................................................................................. 77 8.2. Recommendations .............................................................................................................. 80 8.3. Future work .......................................................................................................................... 80 9. references ........................................................................................................................ 82 Appendix A: internal Study Capacities CGI BRMS ...................................................... 86 Appendix B: Discussion boards ........................................................................................ 88 Appendix C: Use case rule base ........................................................................................ 95 2 1. INTRODUCTION Businesses run on policies and procedures. These are made actionable by business rules. Business rules may apply to people, processes, or corporate behaviour. A business might state that customers of a car insurance company get a ten percent discount after being subscribed for more than five years, or that a bank loan is denied when the customer’s salary is below some threshold. Examples of business rules are endless. They are ubiquitous and many critical business applications rely on an enormous amount of business rules. 1.1. Business rule management systems Rule-based systems have been around for many decades (Hayes-Roth, 1985). The rules used by these systems can be highly dynamic, e.g. rules are affected by changing laws, policies and other sources. Therefore they change more often than the applications that run based upon them (Arsanjani, 2001). This makes it ineffective to manage business rules within an application’s source code. In situations where many of the rules behind an application can be subject to change, a business rule management system (BRMS) can be a very suitable solution. The key principle behind business rules management systems is the separation of application logic and business rules. And these systems should provide the means to easily manage the business rules. Every business rule management system also has a rule engine. A rule engine can be viewed as a sophisticated interpreter of if-then statements (Mahmoud, 2006). It is a software component that executes (business) rules that have been externalized from the application source code into a separate rule base. The externalization of business rules is obviously a vital step in the process of implementing a business rules management system and shall therefore also be covered in this thesis. 3 This separation of rules and application logic combined with rule management functionality should allow rules to be formulated and changed without resorting to IT specialists, hence allowing applications to be more agile and robust. This way business applications are built to merely communicate with the rule engine, which deals with the separately managed rules. A lot has been written about the value of business rules in the recent years, however, few scientific literature deals specifically with BRMS. As mentioned before, rule-based systems are widely used in all business critical applications and the business rules behind them are generally vital for an organization’s survival (Chisholm & Ross, 2007). Business rules management systems aim to help businesses externalizing these business rules and make them more manageable. Practitioners in this field can choose from a number of BRMS products today. However, each product has a different range of features and advocates a different approach to development. They also differ in aspects such as performance, underlying algorithms, target market and ease of use. And although multiple systems are available, only a few vendors have well-established business rules management systems. The process of selecting and implementing the appropriate system is a complex one, with many aspects to consider (Rymer & Gualtieri, 2008). But even before diving into this selection process one should first establish that a business rules management system is a sensible solution. This thesis aims to clarify the suitability of business rules management systems and serve as a guide in the selection and implementation process. Furthermore, this thesis tries to provide insights in how business rules management systems relate to traditional knowledge systems. Also, attention will be paid to related technologies and how business rules management systems fit into the picture of these modern developments. Service oriented architecture is one example of such a technology that is often coupled with business rules management systems (Taylor, 2005). 4 This thesis is carried out within CGI, formerly know as Logica. CGI is a multinational IT consulting, systems integration, outsourcing and solutions company. CGI is interested in exploring the role BRMS’s could have in outsourcing solutions for their clients. 1.2. Research questions The problem outlined above results in the following research question: What guidelines are there to assist in the process of selecting and implementing a business rules management system? This
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