Today I am pleased to announce availability of the new Decision Management Community website called www.decision-tools.org. What is it all about? Continue reading
Category Tools and Technologies
Solving Rule Conflicts – Part 2
“The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters”, Francisco Goya
Defeasible Logic and Business Rules with Probabilities
Modern rules and decisions management systems provide effective mechanisms for development of good decision models. However, building real-world decision models people always face complex issues related to diagnostic and resolution of rule conflicts. Some systems can effectively verify decision model consistency and diagnose rule conflicts. But there are no practically used Business Rules (BR) products that claim that they may automatically resolve rule conflicts.
In the Part 1 of this series I described how end users can represent their rules in single-hit and multi-hit decision tables while avoiding rule conflicts. But is it possible to automatically resolve rule conflicts? I will discuss this problem below. Continue reading
Solving Rule Conflicts – Part 1
Representing Contradictory Rules with Single-Hit and Multi-Hit Decision Tables
Modern rules and decisions management systems provide effective mechanisms for development of good decision models. However, building real-world decision models people always face complex issues related to diagnostic and resolution of rule conflicts. Some systems can effectively verify decision model consistency and diagnose rule conflicts. But there are no practically used Business Rules products that claim that they may automatically resolve rule conflicts (at least I am not aware of them). As a result, it becomes a responsibility of users to represent rules in such a way that allows them to avoid conflicts. Continue reading
Building a Maintainable Product Catalogue with OpenRules Dialog
This year I will chair a workshop “CPSOLVERS-2013” at the major Constraint Programming conference “CP 2013“. Preparing the workshop, we’ve decided to create an industrial overview of all supported constraint solvers currently available to business application developers. Continue reading
Webinar: Creating and Managing Executable Decision Models with DecisionsFirst Modeler and OpenRules
Watch Recorded Webinar
We are pleased to announce a joint free webinar organized by Decision Management Solutions and OpenRules.
Converting Decision Tables from PDF to OpenRules
There is a free tool called “pdftoexcel” that allows you to convert tables from a PDF format to Excel. This tool can safe you a lot of retyping if you have many rules tables in PDF and want to convert them to Excel-based OpenRules decision tables. Continue reading
Combining Constraint Solving with Business Rules and Machine Learning – CoCoMiLe 2013
The integration of different decision making techniques finally is finding its home under the roof of the Decision Management movement. I am glad that an integrated Constraint Programming (CP), Business Rules (BR), and Machine Learning (ML) approach is gaining in popularity as well. An interesting workshop “CoCoMiLe 2013 – Continue reading
Rule Violations and Over-Constrained Problems
“Learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist.” – Pablo Picasso
Practical people know that one of the most important property of a business rule is its ability to be violated. Here are a few examples:
Decision Execution Reports
OpenRules Release 6.2.3 adds an ability to generate decision execution reports in the HTML format. These reports help a rule designer to analyze which rules were actually executed and in which order. Continue reading
How to compact large decision tables
A well-known problem with decision tables is that they frequently become too big and too difficult to manage. It is also well-known that OpenRules utilizes Excel-based decision tables as its major representation mechanism for business rules. So, I decided to share some methods used by our customers to make large decision tables more compact. Continue reading
Search and Replace in Multiple Excel Files with IceTeaReplacer
I believe that OpenRules users will find that a new free tool called “IceTeaReplacer” can be very useful for doing search&replace in OpenRules repositories. Here is a functional description from their website: Continue reading
Deploying OpenRules Applications on Cloud
A week ago at JavaOne Conference in San Francisco I had a chance to talk directly with several providers of cloud deployment solutions for Java applications. I was really impressed with a Ukrainian startup “Jelastic” that just won the Java Community’s version of Oscar and was endorsed by Dr. Gosling – read more here. Coming back home to NJ, I decided to try it myself. I took the existing web application that implements a popular game “Nim” using OpenRules decision tables and forms. It looks as follows:
Previously this web application was deployed at the local Tomcat, and I wanted to move it to the Jelastic’s cloud with minimal efforts. And I had almost no problems of doing that! Now you may try to play Nim yourself from the cloud using this URL http://openrules.jelastic.servint.net/Nim/. What have I actually done?
OpenRules - Decision Intelligence Platform 