Apr 22 2016

After bpmNEXT-2016

Today was the last day of bpmNext-2016 – a great event concentrated around 3 closely related technologies and their standards: BPMN, CMMN, and DMN. You may look at the program to see how many well-known experts and vendors attended the conference. The quality of presentations and informal discussions during and after the sessions was something that we all will remember after this event. Continue reading →

Apr 6 2016

Decision Models: Finding Alternative and Optimal Decisions

People frequently assume that a good, consistent decision model should produce one and only one decision (solution) for any valid input. However, in real-world applications we frequently deal with situations when a decision model may produce multiple feasible solutions for the same input. And it does not mean that the decision model is incomplete – simply a user may choose the most appropriate solution among all produced decisions. It can be done interactively or by adding more rules. I’ve already provided an example “Monkey Business Analyzed” that describes how to deal with multiple decisions using OpenRules What-If Analyzer.  In this post I will describe another  decision model that also shows how to choose an optimal decision among multiple feasible decisions. Continue reading →

Mar 18 2016

RuleML and DecisionCAMP 2016

This year OpenRules will sponsor the 10th International Web Rule Symposium RuleML that will take place at the Stony Brook University, New York on July 6-9, 2016. RuleML is well-known for building bridges between academia and industry in the field of business rules. Our CTO Dr. Jacob Feldman is a publicity chair of the conference. He is also the organizer of DecisionCAMP-2016 that will be held on July 7-8 at RuleML.  This year DecisionCAMP will focus on the new OMG standard “Decision Model and Notation (DMN)” and an emerging best practice.  If you attend, you will have a chance to meet face-to-face with many well-known decision management gurus, vendors, and practitioners.

By jacobfeldman • Posted in Events
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Feb 24 2016

bpmNEXT 2016

This year OpenRules will participate in the bpmNEXT 2016 that will take place at Santa Barbara, CA on April 19-21, 2016. This is a very selective conference that does not allow marketing and forces the presenters to do only live demonstrations of specific achievements that have a chance to shape the next generation of Business Process Management software – including intelligent operations, the Internet of Things, case management, business decision management, and goal-directed processes. I will present “Dynamic Decision Models: Activation/Deactivation of Business Rules in Real ­Time” on Apr. 21 at 14:00. Continue reading →

Dec 31 2015

OpenRules 6.3.4 Introduces What-If Analyzer of Decision Models

On December 28, 2015 we published a new OpenRules release 6.3.4 that introduces What-If Analyzer, the first tool of this type in the Decision Management domain. Its main purpose is to support what-if analysis of decision models built in accordance with the DMN standard. What-if analysis is the process of changing the business rules that represent business logic to see how those changes will affect the outcome of the decision model. Here is the main view of the What-If Analyzer for the decision model “Make a Good Burger” offered by the DMCommunity.org: Continue reading →

Dec 21 2015

Automatically Learned Business Rules: Should We Understand Them?

Question: Should we worry that we’re building systems whose increasingly accurate decisions are based on incomprehensible foundations?

I’ve just posted an article with the same name at the LinkedIn Pulse that addresses this question. It is especially important in the context of rules-based decision making when rules that govern our decisions have been automatically generated using predictive analytics techniques. I shared two examples from OpenRules experience that explain why the automatically generated business rules should be comprehensible. The first one talks about the use of our Rule Learner at IRS. The second example deals with our Rule Compressor.

Oct 8 2015

OpenRules at BBC-2015

Since its incorporation in 2003, every year OpenRules, Inc. attends, sponsors, and presents at the Business Rules Forums. This year OpenRules  will again be a sponsor and a presenter at this largest Business Rules and Decision Management event now called BBC-2015 that will be held in Las Vegas on November 2-6, 2015. Continue reading →

By jacobfeldman • Posted in Events
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Aug 10 2015

Predictive Analytics is Becoming Mainstream

“Big Data” have brought “Predictive Analytics” (long-time available but hidden in the academic world under the names “Machine Learning” and “Data Mining”) to the spotlight of the modern Business Analytics. These days you will find many examples when analytics enables business decisions by supporting a path from data to decisions and actions. Below I will briefly talk about nowadays positioning of the Business Analytics and more about OpenRules own experience in this area including OpenRules Rule Learner. Continue reading →

Jul 31 2015

Don’t Program a System, Educate It!

Modern decision management techniques enable business decisions by supporting a path from data to decisions and actions. Wherever people use stand-alone Business Rules, Complex Event Processing, Predictive Analytics, Optimization systems or their combinations, they prefer to put in charge subject matter experts and not software developers.  Actually, all these systems tend to be declarative and allow customers to feed their systems with externally maintained business knowledge, e.g. historical data and/or already known business rules. Nowadays people in a way want to educate a general purpose system with their domain-specific knowledge avoiding traditional programming. Continue reading →

Apr 25 2015

DMN 1.1 Issues: Aggregation

DMN defines “aggregation” in the following way:

“Multiple hits must be aggregated into a single result. DMN 1.0 specifies six aggregation indicators, namely: collect, sum, min, max, average. Optionally, the aggregation indicator may be included in the table. The default is collect.”

Below is a list of my issues with this DMN 1.0 approach. Continue reading →

Jan 31 2015

Decision Model “Vehicle Insurance – UServ Product Derby”

As a response to the DMCommunity.org challenge, I will describe an OpenRules-based implementation of the highly popular use case known as “UServ Product Derby”. The use case deals with automobile insurance problems including eligibility and pricing decisions for a hypothetical insurance company “UServ”. Its detailed description can be found here. Our implementation may be considered as another complex-enough example of the DMN approach. Continue reading →

Oct 30 2014

Decisions with Mitigation Criteria

The Decision Management Community (http://DMCommunity.org) published an interesting Challenge in Oct-2014. It deals with a quite typical problem when some business rules may be mitigated by other rules.  Here is an OpenRules-based solution that follows the DMN guidelines. The main idea is to use multi-hit decision tables when more specific rules (mitigations) may override more generic rules. Continue reading →

Mar 7 2014

Learning Business Rules from Data at RuleML-2014

This year RuleML-2014 will be held in Prague on Aug 18-20. For the first time it will include a special track called “Learning Business Rules from Data”.  As a member of the organizing committee, I posted the proper announcement here. It promises to become a very interesting event when the decision management practitioners meet their academic partners. Continue reading →

Feb 23 2014

Can a Decision Model Define Uniqueness of Objects inside a Collection?

This question was asked by Antonio Plais – see the LinkedIn discussion. Several practical variations of this question were mentioned: 1) Define if the same product appears more than once in the same sales order; 2) determine the uniqueness of records in a file to be loaded into a Data Warehouse.  Obviously, the question deals with business rules defined on collections of objects – not the most popular topic among decision modelers. Continue reading →

Jan 8 2014

Another DMN Decision Model (executable!)

Today Nick Broom published his own example of a decision model based on his understanding of the current version of the DMN standard. Nick is a business analyst and a well-known decision management practitioner, so his interpretation is very valuable as the standard is oriented to the business analysts (not to programmers). Nick’s example is supposed to make a decision whether an applicant is eligible or ineligible to a credit card. Nick described a simple credit card application process and designed decision requirements diagrams and related decision tables.

Starting to read his post, I decided that it could be helpful to make Nick’s decision model executable and to test if it actually produces the expected results. It took me several hours to do it using mainly Excel and the latest version of OpenRules BDMS.   Continue reading →

Jan 3 2014

My LinkedIn Discussions

LinkedIn today is probably the most popular social network for professionals. Looking for one of my old posts, I noticed that it is not so simple to find it and many people have troubles to do it. However, when you click on your name inside any discussion you will receive links to everything you posted but only within one discussion group. Here are LinkedIn discussions that I’ve started in several groups: Continue reading →

Oct 29 2013

OpenRules at Decision CAMP 2013

OpenRules is one of the initiators and sponsors of the DecisionCAMP-2013, the
first event for Decision Management practitioners, which will be held in San Jose, CA on Nov 4-6. This event attracted many well-known experts in the business rules and decisions management area – see the agenda. We expect ~250 attendees. OpenRules will participate in the following mini-events: Continue reading →

Oct 28 2013

OpenRules in Japan

EWS-2013, Tokyo

Dr. Feldman and Mr. Nakayama, CEO at Intra-Mart

I’ve just returned from my first ever trip to Japan. I am coming back home to the US with very bright impressions of the Japanese culture and people. I was especially impressed by the deep respect and high professionalism with which people in Japan perform their jobs independently of how small or important those jobs are. I deeply appreciate the friendliness and readiness to help from people on the streets of Tokyo and Kyoto that I have not seen for a while.

This visit was organized by our Japanese partner NTT Data Intra-Mart. Continue reading →

Aug 14 2013

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 →

Aug 14 2013

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 →

Apr 3 2013

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 →

Jan 9 2013

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 →