On the design of an advanced business rule engine Jiménez, Patricia; Corchuelo, Rafael
Software, practice & experience,
October 2022, 2022-10-00, 20221001, Letnik:
52, Številka:
10
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Business rules govern how well‐managed companies perform every day. They are expected to be written in natural language because they are devised by business people. That makes it difficult to ...translate them automatically into executable rules that can be integrated into typical information systems. Our industrial and academic research concludes that the current tools have a number of problems, namely: many of them do not pay any attention to the SBVR standard; some of them are not multi‐language; most of them cannot achieve perfect parsing accuracy; some of them are not domain agnostic; some of them use proprietary technologies; some of them do not produce executable rules; and none supports exploratory what‐if analyses natively. In this article, we present Tier‐Rules, which is a system that overcomes the previous problems. We also report on an industrial case study that helps illustrate it in practice.
Building Information Modeling (BIM) is a widely established method in the architecture, engineering, construction, and facilities management (AEC/FM) industry. Although BIM focuses on processes ...throughout the lifecycle of the built environment, the applications in the planning phase, e.g. the generation of construction site layouts, have not reached their full potential yet. One important example herein is the allocation and dimensioning of resources (e.g., building materials and equipment) which is typically carried out by humans according to clearly defined rules and best practices. This paper presents model-based rule checking for the planning of construction site layouts. We demonstrate that existing Business Rule Management Systems (BRMS), such as the open-source rule engine Drools, can be used. We combine Drools with the Industry Foundation Classes (IFC) to retrieve data from a building information model and use the information within the rule engine. We define general model requirements and implement a sample set of prototype rules. We also introduce the concept of offset geometry for rules that, for example, demand a known safety distance between temporary construction site elements. The developed approaches are explained and evaluated in field-realistic, practical case studies. Finally, we present a discussion how the application of the developed rule-based system may assist human decision making in tasks such as safe construction sites layout planning.
•BIM methods currently do not include tools for construction site layout planning.•A background review presents existing manual techniques and their shortcomings.•The process of digitalizing the construction site layout planning process is explained.•Applications of rule checking in planning temporary construction objects are shown.•An outlook presents strategies for implementation in construction projects.
This study proposes a novel framework for designing business rule analytics to assist businesses offering digital content in effectively converting free-only users (FOUs) into paying customers. Based ...on the theory of expected utility, we expand upon traditional frequency-driven rule analytics by integrating three business-relevant factors (target size, conversion profit, and conversion likelihood) into the process of generating recommendations for FOUs in digital content markets. The framework was tested using two different types of empirical analysis. We conducted a field experiment collaborating with a nationwide e-book store to determine how FOUs responded to the recommendations generated under the proposed framework. Furthermore, we analyzed over 5 million transactions collected from the e-book seller and a mobile application provider to examine the impact of customer segmentation on the effectiveness of our approach. Our findings suggest that business analytics derived from the utility-based mechanisms can significantly enhance digital content providers' business performance.
Today, businesses need to continuously adjust to a dynamic environment. Enterprises have to deal with global competition and technological advances, meet government regulations, and keep their ...expenses under control. Under these pressures, enterprises need to implement and improve software that supports and helps to evolve their business. However, as practice shows, software implementation projects are complex, and a considerable percentage of them do not meet business requirements. Therefore, a business needs to manage software implementation properly. Existing research shows that using business rules (BR) in software implementation projects helps to ensure its success. The purpose of our study is to advance the understanding of how BR affect software implementation success, namely, which key characteristics of BR are the most important. To achieve this goal, the top thousand enterprises in Slovenia, by added value, facing typical software implementation projects were surveyed. The obtained results show that BR that are specifically prepared for a particular project and easy to understand have a statistically significant positive effect on software implementation project success.
Business process analytics and verification have become a major challenge for companies, especially when process data is stored across different systems. It is important to ensure Business Process ...Compliance in both data-flow perspectives and business rules that govern the organisation. In the verification of data-flow accuracy, the conformance of data to business rules is a key element, since essential to fulfil policies and statements that govern corporate behaviour. The inclusion of business rules in an existing and already deployed process, which therefore already counts on stored data, requires the checking of business rules against data to guarantee compliance. If inconsistency is detected then the source of the problem should be determined, by discerning whether it is due to an erroneous rule or to erroneous data. To automate this, a diagnosis methodology following the incorporation of business rules is proposed, which simultaneously combines business rules and data produced during the execution of the company processes. Due to the high number of possible explanations of faults (data and/or business rules), the likelihood of faults has been included to propose an ordered list. In order to reduce these possibilities, we rely on the ranking calculated by means of an AHP (Analytic Hierarchy Process) and incorporate the experience described by users and/or experts. The methodology proposed is based on the Constraint Programming paradigm which is evaluated using a real example. .
The challenges of the development of a suitable ontology scheme in decision-making environment should be taken in conjunction with the exploitation of more recent technologies. It is expected that ...the use of ontologies will lead to the construction of more intelligent applications, allowing them to work more specifically at a human conceptual level. We propose in this article an approach that analyses the impact of changes in the ontology on business rules in order to detect inconsistencies that may be generated. In addition, the developed tool provides solutions to repair inconsistencies with the help of domain experts. In our work, business rules are edited from the concepts and properties that are stored in an OWL (Web Ontology Language) ontology named OntoloG. This latter is implemented throughout the use of Protégé 4.0.2.with the OWL sub-language. OntoloG has been developed by the knowledge acquisition from documents, collection and capitalisation of business rules process with experts in SONATRACH AVAL.
Process modeling and rule modeling languages are both used to document organizational policies and procedures. To date, their synergies and overlap are under-researched. Understanding the ...relationship between the two modeling types would allow organizations to maximize synergies, avoid content duplication, and thus reduce their overall modeling effort. In this paper, we use the Bunge–Wand–Weber (BWW) representation theory to compare the representation capabilities of process and rule modeling languages. We perform a representational analysis of four rule modeling specifications: The Simple Rule Markup Language (SRML), the Semantic Web Rules Language (SWRL), the Production Rule Representation (PRR), and the Semantics of Business Vocabulary and Business Rules (SBVR) specification. We compare their BWW representation capabilities with those of four popular conceptual process modeling languages. In our analysis, we focus on the aspects of maximum ontological completeness and minimum ontological overlap. The outcome of this study shows that no single language is internally complete with respect to the BWW representation model. We also show that a combination of two languages, in particular SRML and BPMN, appears to be better suited for combined process and rule modeling than any of these modeling languages used independently.
Several studies point the business' misunderstanding as one of the main causes for software development failure. The proposal of this study is to conduct a work focused on business rules that is ...based on knowledge management and research consistence, cataloging and dissemination of payroll law of human resources of the brazilian public agents, aiming at the right way to gather software requirements to lead a correct path to the development of a safe and effective payroll software. Keywords: business rule; legislation; knowledge management. 1.Introduçao A inexistencia de clareza das regras e a carencia de informaçoes sobre o negócio, pela equipe de Tecnología da Informaçâo (TI), tem se mostrado como um problema nos projetos relativos ao desenvolvimento de softwares, uma vez que dificulta a entrega do produto com a segurança e precisâo necessárias. Acrescente-se que a legislaçao aplicável aos servidores públicos também sofre reflexo de outras fontes do Direito, tais como pareceres da Advocacia-Geral da Uniao e acordaos do Tribunal de Contas da Uniao e de diversos órgaos do Poder Judiciário.
Business rules are evidently important for organisations as they describe how they are doing business. Their value has also been recognised within the information system (IS) domain, mostly because ...of their ability to make applications flexible and amenable to change. In this paper, we propose a methodology that helps business people and developers to keep business rules at the business level inline with the rules that are implemented at the system level. In contrast to several existing approaches that primarily focus on business rules in the scope of an application, our methodology addresses the entire IS of an organisation. The paper also describes requirements for a tool support that would be appropriate to support the methodology.
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