Category Business Rules

Aug 28 2022

Business Rules and SQL: Competitors or Partners?

IEEE Spectrum just published the article “The Rise of SQL” about the recent SQL’s comeback caused not only by the ever-increasing use of databases, but also by the use of SQL within the fields of data science, machine learning, big data, and streaming systems. While traditionally, Business Rule Engines did not communicate with databases directly, our customers frequently prefer to use SQL-like business rules to access their data when it is necessary following their business logic. At the same time, they want to preserve the power of SQL dealing with databases of any complexity. Two years ago OpenRules introduced a special product “Rule DB” that does exactly this by empowering Excel-based business rules with a run-time RDBMS communication mechanism. In this post we will explain how to migrate an SQL query to OpenRules.

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Mar 26 2022

OpenRules Debuggers

OpenRules Decision Manager provides two Decision Model Debuggers:

While the graphical debugger is the most user friendly debugger, it is currently available only under Windows and Linux. The Command Line Debugger is available under Windows, Mac, and Linux. Continue reading →

Jun 20 2021

Rules-based Machine Learning

The integrated use of Rule Engine and Machine Learning (ML) products becomes more and more popular. OpenRules Rule Learner is a good example of such integration. While there are plenty of powerful Machine Learning algorithms available off-the-shelf, it can be quite practical to use rules-based machine learning instead. The classical rules-based technology may address learning problems considering historical and constantly changing operational data. In such situations a “Rule Engine” plays a role of a “Rule Learner”. Here is a good example.

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Nov 24 2020

Partnership with ProcessMaker

Today ProcessMaker and OpenRules announced a new partnership that provides our customers with an integrated business process and decision management solution. The partnership adds high performance decision services created in OpenRules and deployed as AWS Lambdas to business applications built with ProcessMaker. It unlocks a powerful new level of sophistication for process, workflow, and business rules designers around the globe. This webinar demonstrates an implementation of a loan origination process in ProcessMaker that utilizes complex decision services built in OpenRules. Read Press Release.

 
Nov 13 2020

RuleDB.com – Accessing Database from Business Rules

Traditionally, Business Rule Engines do not communicate with databases directly and expect to receive input and provide output via intermediate objects defined in Java, JSON, or XML. However, our customers frequently prefer to use business-friendly rules defined in Excel instead of separately defined SQL statements. Our new product “Rule DB” does exactly this. In this post I will describe how it works using the MySQL Sample Database. Continue reading →

Oct 5 2020

Compressing Decision Tables

The DMC Challenge Sep-2020 deals with compression of decision tables trying to replace relatively large decision tables with “almost” equivalent but smaller decision tables. It is only natural to apply Machine Learning to this problem as it allows us to automatically discover business rules from the sets of labeled historical data records. So, I decided to use the open source Rule Learner to address this problem. In this post I will describe how I approached this problem with these implementation steps:

  1. Write a simple generator of data instances with various combinations of known attributes
  2. Run the existing decision table using OpenRules to produce labeled instances
  3. Feed the labeled instances to Rule Learner (or SaaS Rule Learner) to automatically discover a new decision table and evaluate its performance.

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Apr 5 2020

Deploying Decision Optimization Models as AWS Lambda Microservices

OpenRules offers two open source products to support an integrated use of “Business Decision Modeling with Rule Engines and CP/LP Solvers“:

In this post I will describe how you can deploy decision optimization models as AWS Decision Microservices without programming or complex configuration. Continue reading →

Jan 9 2020

Debugging Business Decision Models

OpenRules Decision Manager 8.1.0 includes a special Rule Debugger that allows business users to debug their decision models while they are being executed. The debugger stops execution after executing the first selected rule and a user can analyze the current content of all decision variables to understand why certain rules were executed or skipped. After pushing “Enter” the next selected rule will be executed. A user may continue to push “Enter” until all rules are executed. Continue reading →

Aug 30 2019

Now Business Analysts can Deploy their Business Decision Models on Amazon Cloud

Nowadays rules-based business decision models are usually developed and maintained by business analysts or other subject matter experts (not by software developers). And more and more people want to make their business decision models available from cloud as operational decision services. But is it possible for non-technical people to achieve this objective? There are so many new terms and concepts to learn, that it seems doubtful for business people to handle this task. Continue reading →

Aug 20 2019

Rules Debugger for OpenRules Business Decision Models

When our customers create business decision models, they frequently want to have an ability to debug their business rules to understand when and why their rules were executed or skipped. We provided them with the Decision Model Analyzer that partially answers these questions but does it after (!) the model has been already executed. We’ve just completed the development of a new OpenRules Rules Debugger that allows a business user to debug her/his decision models while they are being executed. Continue reading →

Jul 8 2019

Can ML help with Compression of Large Rulesets?

The integrated use of Machine Learning (ML) and Business Rules (BR) is one of the most practical trends in the development of modern decision-making software. OpenRules is involved in this development for more than 10 years starting with our successful ML+BR projects for IRS. Along with a general purpose Rule Learner, we also provide Rule Compressor, that uses ML to compress large decision tables to smaller ones. This recent presentation explains how it works. Continue reading →