... or why should you start using a rule engine

Business rules

Business rules are the conditions and laws that have impact on the business processes of an organisation. Organisations must cope with thousands of business rules in different areas as market strategies, pricing, inventory management, production management. Business rules are very often the dynamic part of the IT-systems; changes in the business rules requires fast adaptioon of the IT-systems.

Rule engine

Software for storage and execution of business rules. The business conditions and laws are represented as structured rules and decision tables. A rule engine is often deployed as a decision service in the IT-architecture

A high quality rule engine satisfies at the following criteria:

1. Optimized algorithms for rule excecution.
2. Rule representation close to natural language
3. graphical tools for rule editing and management
4. version and validity control of rule set
5. easy deployment to multiple excecution engines
6. support for SOA

Organisational gains

The use of a rule engine or expert system provide a number of financial and managerial benefits.

Among the managerial benefits are:

• faster implementation of rule changes.
• the rules are easy to understand for non-technical people.
• the rules can be managed by the business organization, not the IT-department.
• visible rules improves the common understanding of the organzations business processes.

Among the financial benefits are:

• reduced total cost for use and management of the business system
• improved capability to handle business and organisation changes.
• reduced risk in development project.