OpenRules team worked hard to prepare a nice New Year gift for our customers and today I am glad to announce OpenRules Decision Model Explorer! Click HERE to see how it looks.

Yes, it is a Graphical Integrated Decision Modeling Environment that includes automatically built Diagrams (DRDs) for business decision models!

Here is its preview:

Each OpenRules Decision Manager project will now include the batch file “explorer.bat”.  For example, when I opened OpenRules Explorer for the standard decision model “PatientTherapy” I received the above picture.

You can click on the icon  in the title bar to select any other decision model project.  When you open OpenRules Explorer from the folder with an existing decision model for the first time, it will generate its diagram using only goals and subgoals like in the above picture.

This diagram reflects the Goal-Oriented Decision Modeling approach described in this book and in general follows the DMN (Decision Model and Notation) graphical convention for decision requirement diagrams. All goals are shown as yellow rounded rectangles and the main goals has a red border. The arrows between goals show the automatically (!) discovered knowledge relationships, e.g. the goal “Recommended Dose” depends on the sub-goal  “Patient Creatinine Clearance”.

You don’t have to draw the diagram yourself as it’s being automatically generated based on already defined glossary, goal/sub-goals, and tables that specify their logic. The file structure of the rules repository has shown in the left panel. A double-click on a file or on any node inside the diagram opens an Excel file with the corresponding table.

You may create different views of the same decision model by selecting different elements from the legend on the right. The above diagram was created when the “Goals” (and only them) were selected. If you also select “Tables”, all related decision tables (and other business knowledge model elements such as “Decision”, “DecisionService”, “Code”, “Method”) will be shown as blue rectangles:

You can easily adjust this diagram in many ways. You may drag any nodes around and all arrows will follow your changes.

You may also select “Input Data” and all decision variables as white rounded rectangles will be shown with dashed arrows to the goals that use them.

You may also select “Concepts” to show the business concepts described in your glossary as pink rounded rectangles (while “Inputs” are deselected):

You can use green navigation buttons in the bottom to move the image around, to zoom in/out, or click on to center the diagram.

You can click on the button “Export PDF” to export the diagram to the PDF format in the file of your choice.

There are many other useful features that allow you to explore the decision model:

	modify the properties of the decision model
	show the execution path, run tests, and analyze the execution reports
	deploy the decision model on-cloud or on-premise.

We’ve already received good feedback from our beta users with many useful suggestions for improvements. The new OpenRules Explorer will become a part of the standard OpenRules Decision Manager installation in January-2021.

Happy New Year!