Requirements for Rules Engines

IBM DeveloperWorks has an article by Ben Lieberman about the Requirements of Rules Engines. For those of us who are new to Rules Engines (wikipedia) this is a good nuts and bolts description of how they are assembled and what is needed to execute a good program. Ben does a good job outlining the specific of rules engines such as rules definitions, categories of rules, and grouping rules to help formulate decision logic. Even though this article is primarily for the rules engine programmer it is a good comprehensive outline of how the rules engine works.

Let Simon Decide the tough questions

While perusing through one of my favorite blogs Lifehacker I came upon an interesting post about difficult decision making. The post was about a website that helps in the difficult decision making process. The website is called Let Simon Decide. Its an interesting concept for a website. The premise is that it will ask questions and help you along on the process for an answer. Let Simon Decide seems to be a tool for decision making.

What I find interesting about the concept of the Let Simon Decide website is its possibility in the field of Operations Research or more simply the science of decision making. Perhaps a similar website could be created for business rules. Perhaps there can be simplified tools that can help one find the right path to the answer. From an organization and business rules process perspective there could be limitless scenarios. Can "Simon" decide the optimal transportation network? Can "Simon" decide the best resources to meet the given task?

Finding answers to life's questions can be difficult but maybe the process itself need not be complex. Sometimes we get so bogged down trying to find the answer that we lose sight of the process. I find myself in that trap a lot. The process to find the answer could be greatly simplified with the right tools in place. The medium of the Internet, I believe, can help greatly as a method for these decision making tools. Information is readily available in many different forms and many times freely. The right tools in place can help the decision maker point to a path that leads them to the answer with information gathered from anywhere in the world. Time will tell if we could simply go to a website and ask "What is the allocation of resources to maximize my time?" Now that would be an interesting website.

JBoss Drools Business Rules book release

A new book was released this week on business rules called JBoss Drools Business Rules published by Packt. JBoss Drools Business Rules is a informational book intended for JBoss Drools implmentation and practice. The idea of the book is to help implement JBoss Drools to develop easy to understand business rules applications within a Business Rules Management System.

For those new to JBoss Drools, Drools is an open source business rules management system that is free to download, use, embed and distribute. From the Drools website...

Drools is a business rule management system (BRMS) and an enhanced Rules Engine implementation, ReteOO, based on Charles Forgy's Rete algorithm tailored for the JVM. More importantly, Drools provides for Declarative Programming and is flexible enough to match the semantics of your problem domain with Domain Specific Languages, graphical editing tools, web based tools and developer productivity tools.

Introduction to business rules

Since I am learning more about business rules I thought I would share some resources from around the internet. There is definitely a lot of information on the subject. It does take some effort to sift between the advertising and the good content.

IBM developerWorks has a great article by Arun Chhatpar on an Introduction to Business Rules. Incidentatly IBM developerWorks has a great wealth of information on Open Source software. Additionally here is the Wikipedia entry on Business Rules. The Business Rules Group, a non-commercial IT peer group, has some good examples of Business Rules.

Please share other sources of Rules Engines and Business Rules.

Open source Business Rules Management Systems and Rules Engines

I've seen much talk on the internet about advancement of Rules Engines and Business Rules Management Systems (BRMS). As you can imagine there are Open Source options for Rules Engines and business rules systems. It seems the top players in Rules Engines are written mostly in the Java programming language which fairly recently was made Open Source by Sun Microsystems. Yet with Open Source software the possibilties could be endless with the tools used to develop Rules Engines.

Some of the top Open Source players in the Rules Engine business include:

Drools

OpenRules

JRulesEngine

The interesting thing about Rules Engines and Business Rules Management Systems is they most invariably use a rules repository. This repository could be setup on a client/server network which is very easy to setup with the Open Source Linux operating system.

For another resource, Business Review Online's Open Source Blog had a review last year of the Top 10 Best Open Source Rules Engines.

Now I have to admit that I am fairly new to BRMS and Rules Engines. I tend to deal more with the modelling and decision support systems of the Rules Engines. I would love to learn more about this area.