What are business rules engine tools and what are the advantages?

Business rules engine tools are software components that will allow the non-programmers to add or change the logic of a business within a business process management system. The business rule is a statement that will describe a business policy or a procedure. The business logic will describe the sequence of operations that are associated with the data within the database for executing the rule. The business rules engine tools work by separating the execution code for multiple business rules from the overall business management system. This will help the end user in changing the business rules without asking a programmer for help. When there is a change, the engine will evaluate the effect of the change and other rules within the system. It will also flag the user in case there is a conflict. The following section of the article is based on the advantages of business rules engine tools.

The advantages of business rules engine tools

The primary advantage of using the business rules engine tools is, it says “what to do” instead of “how to do it”. The key advantage of this feature is the rules make it easy in expressing the solutions for the difficult problems and they consequently have these solutions verified as well. The rules system is capable of solving complicated problems while offering an explanation of how the solution has arrived and why every decision was made.

The next advantage is logic and data separation. The data is in the domain objects while the logic is within the rules. This is what breaks the fundamental coupling of data and logic. Now, this can be an advantage or a disadvantage. The good thing is, logic can be easier to maintain in case there are changes in the future because the logic is all layered out in rules. This is true if the logic is cross-domain or multi-domain.

Speed and scalability is another advantage of business rules engine tools. There are multiple algorithms that come into account. These include the Rete algorithm, the leaps algorithm and also its descendants like Drools’ Reteoo. They offer effective ways of matching the rule patterns in your domain object data. Also, they are especially more efficient when you have datasets that will not change entirely. These algorithms are absolutely battle proven.

The next advantage is the centralization of knowledge. While using the business rules engine tools, you will be able to create repository knowledge. This is executable. This means it is a single point of truth for business policy. Ideally, the rules are so easily readable that they can also act as a document.

Tool integration is also another advantage of using business rules engine tools. There are tools like Eclipse that offers ways for editing and managing the rules and avail immediate feedback, content assistance and validation. There are auditing and debugging tools as well. The rule system will offer an explanation facility by being able to log the decisions made by the rule engine along with why the decisions were made.