Business Rules Engine Research Articles

System for Context-Specific Visualization of Clinical Practice Guidelines (GuLiNav): Concept and Software Implementation.

BackgroundClinical decision support systems often adopt and operationalize existing clinical practice guidelines leading to higher guideline availability, increased guideline adherence, and data integration. Most of these systems use an internal state-based model of a clinical practice guideline to derive recommendations but do not provide the user with comprehensive insight into the model.ObjectiveHere we present a novel approach based on dynamic guideline visualization that incorporates the individual patient’s current treatment context.MethodsWe derived multiple requirements to be fulfilled by such an enhanced guideline visualization. Using business process and model notation as the representation format for computer-interpretable guidelines, a combination of graph-based representation and logical inferences is adopted for guideline processing. A context-specific guideline visualization is inferred using a business rules engine.ResultsWe implemented and piloted an algorithmic approach for guideline interpretation and processing. As a result of this interpretation, a context-specific guideline is derived and visualized. Our implementation can be used as a software library but also provides a representational state transfer interface. Spring, Camunda, and Drools served as the main frameworks for implementation. A formative usability evaluation of a demonstrator tool that uses the visualization yielded high acceptance among clinicians.ConclusionsThe novel guideline processing and visualization concept proved to be technically feasible. The approach addresses known problems of guideline-based clinical decision support systems. Further research is necessary to evaluate the applicability of the approach in specific medical use cases.

On the design of an advanced business rule engine

AbstractBusiness 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.

System of rules integration problems and solutions to enterprise resource planing systems

A Business rules (BR) and business rules engine (BRE) enables an organization to increase its agility and speed to adapt to business process changes. This article analyzes business rules, business rules engines, and possibilitiesof their applying in resourcesmanagement systems used by enterprises.Ways of implementing business rules are discussed, considering peculiarities of business resources engines. The analysis shows that one of the ways to employ business rules is databasemanagementwith the help of triggers. An analysis of business rules engines is performed, and an extension realizing business rules transformation intoDBMS triggers is suggested.

Formal Model of Business Processes Integrated with Business Rules

Business Processes describe the ways in which operations are carried out in order to accomplish the intended objectives of organizations. A process can be depicted using a modeling notation, such as Business Process Model and Notation. Process model can also describe operational aspects of every task; but in a properly designed model, the detailed aspects of low-level logic should be delegated to external services, especially to a Business Rule Engine. Business Rules support the specification of knowledge in a declarative manner and can be successfully used for specification of details for process tasks and events. However, there is no unified model of process integrated with rules that ensures data types consistency. Thus, the paper presents a formal description of the integration of Business Processes with Business Rules. We provide a general model for such integration as well as the model applied to a specific rule representation from the Semantic Knowledge Engineering approach.

Cross organizational standardized business process integration and its application in Saudi Arabian banking system regulation: A case study of advanced IRB regulation

The idea for this paper came after the recent financial crisis, its global consequences and specifically how it affected the banking sector. Financial institutions and regulators are – from a technical point of view - not fully integrated and automated yet. The inaccuracy in banks’ data and the long set interval period, quarterly, to send the information to the regulators leads to delays interventions by local supervisory regulators. Most of the banks are using an Internal Ratings Based (IRB) approach that allows them to use their own methods to calculate the credit risks, which makes it difficult for the regulators to verify and validate the banks’ data without adopting fully automated connectivity for the regulatory reporting system through sophisticated tools. The importance of this issue, for the central banks as well as the global economy, encourages us to investigate and to find solutions for the problem at hand. This paper is focused on the Advanced Internal Ratings Based (A-IRB) approach to evaluate credit risk due to the importance and the sensitivity of this approach on the banking sector. The flexibility of the A-IRB approach allow banks to use their own method to calculate the credit risk without regulators having the right tools to validate the data is a major issue . The second issue with the A-IRB approach is that the report is only delivered quarterly to the regulator (SAMA). This period is too long as decisions can be taken based on data that is almost a quarter old. Therefore, evaluating the existing framework and solving the issues concurrently is essential to improve the regulatory reporting system. To examine the situation of the regulatory reporting system, first, we reviewed literature on the Basel II&III regulations and the financial crisis, including impacts and responses. The second, we reviewed factors impeding the implementation of Basel II&III, including solutions to increase coordination and integration and a holistic approach that can mitigate the outstanding issues for the Regulatory Reporting System for the local banks in Saudi Arabia. We also evaluated the current system and the proposed system in two workshops and found that the proposed system showed considerable improvements of more than 100% in some areas and hence should be implemented. Our result is a framework solution that integrates a private cloud computing network with automated and integrated features such as a Business Process Manager, a Knowledge Management Engine, a SLA Lifecycle Manager, a Business Rules Engine and a Data Quality Regulator and the Enterprise Service Bus for communication and integration between the banks and SAMA. Keywords: Business Process, Business Rules, Bank Management

Indexing and selecting hierarchical business logic

Business rule management is the task of storing and maintaining company-specific decision rules and business logic that is queried frequently by application users. These rules can impede efficient query processing when they require the business rule engine to resolve semantic hierarchies. To address this problem, this work discusses hierarchical indexes that are performance and storage-conscious. In the first part of this work, we develop a tree-based hierarchical structure that represents client-defined semantic hierarchies as well as two variants of this structure that improve performance and main memory allocation. The second part of our work focuses on selecting the top rules out of those retrieved from the index. We formally define a priority score-based decision scheme that allows for a conflict-free rule system and efficient rule ranking. Additionally, we introduce a weight-based lazy merging technique for rule selection. All of these techniques are evaluated with real world and synthetic data sets.

Panacea, a semantic-enabled drug recommendations discovery framework

BackgroundPersonalized drug prescription can be benefited from the use of intelligent information management and sharing. International standard classifications and terminologies have been developed in order to provide unique and unambiguous information representation. Such standards can be used as the basis of automated decision support systems for providing drug-drug and drug-disease interaction discovery. Additionally, Semantic Web technologies have been proposed in earlier works, in order to support such systems.ResultsThe paper presents Panacea, a semantic framework capable of offering drug-drug and drug-diseases interaction discovery. For enabling this kind of service, medical information and terminology had to be translated to ontological terms and be appropriately coupled with medical knowledge of the field. International standard classifications and terminologies, provide the backbone of the common representation of medical data while the medical knowledge of drug interactions is represented by a rule base which makes use of the aforementioned standards. Representation is based on a lightweight ontology. A layered reasoning approach is implemented where at the first layer ontological inference is used in order to discover underlying knowledge, while at the second layer a two-step rule selection strategy is followed resulting in a computationally efficient reasoning approach. Details of the system architecture are presented while also giving an outline of the difficulties that had to be overcome.ConclusionsPanacea is evaluated both in terms of quality of recommendations against real clinical data and performance. The quality recommendation gave useful insights regarding requirements for real world deployment and revealed several parameters that affected the recommendation results. Performance-wise, Panacea is compared to a previous published work by the authors, a service for drug recommendations named GalenOWL, and presents their differences in modeling and approach to the problem, while also pinpointing the advantages of Panacea. Overall, the paper presents a framework for providing an efficient drug recommendations service where Semantic Web technologies are coupled with traditional business rule engines.

Adaptation process control software developer team with the rules of logic

The article describes the basic principles of the production process in the development of software products. It proposes to improve SCRUM methodology through the use of logical rules for automated adaptation of processes to increase the efficiency of the development process. It is also suggested to use business rules for declaring constraints on the processes that occur when using SCRUM methodology. The solution consists in the use of a business rules engine for managing business processes’ constraints.Business rule is an expression that defines and limits some aspects of the current process. This may be an agreement or determination of the policy regarding the criteria of work with customers, partners or employees. Business rules typically consist of a set of terms, facts and rules. This term is a word or phrase in any natural language. A set of such rules expresses the knowledge that determines the policy of specific processes of an organization.The key to the proposed approach is considered as rules of the process control. They include changes of the procedures of the process when changing its status.The practical significance of the study is the possibility of application of the proposals, recommendations and developments related to the operation, in order to optimize business processes.Thus, it is possible to improve the monitoring and management of the development team, using a defined set of business rules that govern behavior in the event of unplanned situations in the processes that occur when using SCRUM - methodology

Business rules management in healthcare: A lifecycle approach

This paper proposes a framework to apply business rules management (BRM) to healthcare service delivery. Implementation of recently government-mandated quality standards for healthcare provider requires them to modify or change their business processes, practices, and approach to healthcare delivery. An automated business rules management will provide significant benefits to these providers. The benefits include greater control, improved flexibility, and the ability to rapidly deploy business rules across processes, information systems and channels (web, legacy, wireless and otherwise). These benefits, in addition to trends in service orientated architectures, web semantics, and business process management, have spawned an emerging business rules engine (BRE) market. Despite these developments, little has been published in MIS journals that examine the management of business rules management systems (BRMS) development and deployments in general, and in healthcare service sector in particular. Making use of structuration research methods, we collect data from leading developers, end-users, researchers and thought leaders from the industry. Data collection results revealed a business rules management lifecycle inclusive of these steps: align, capture, organize, author, distribute, test, apply, and maintain. The contextual influences, actors, inputs, outputs and artifacts are identified in each step. Academic and managerial contributions, as well as recommendations for future research are provided.

Knowledge-Based AOP Framework for Business Rule Aspects in Business Process

In recent years, numerous studies have identified and explored issues related to web-service-oriented business process specifications, such as business process execution language (BPEL). In particular, business rules are an important cross-cutting concern that should be distinguished from business process instances. In this paper, we present a rule-based aspect oriented programming (AOP) framework where business rule aspects contained in business processes can be effectively separated and executed. This is achieved by using a mechanism of the business rule itself at the business rule engine instead of using existing programming language-based AOP technologies. Through some illustrative examples, this work also introduces a method by which business rule aspects, separated through an external rule engine, can be represented and evaluated. We also demonstrate how they can be dynamically woven and executed by providing an implementation example which uses two open-source-based products, the Mandarax rules engine and Bexee BPEL engine.

Service-Oriented Solution Framework for Internet Banking

This paper describes a service-oriented solution framework designed for Internet banking in financial services. A pragmatic approach is developed to help migrate conventional n-tier e-commerce systems to a service-oriented computing paradigm, composed of Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA), Integration (SOI), Process (SOP), and Management (SOM). This comprehensive framework comprises Service Patterns, Architecture Process, Hybrid Methodology, Service-Oriented Enterprise Model, and Solution Platform. E-business patterns are applied to categorize diverse online services, which form the baseline for subsequent selection justifications of appropriate technologies, products/tools, and infrastructure. A multi-level architecture process is developed to cope with the architecture complexity in a disciplined way. Furthermore, a hybrid methodology is designed to leverage the benefits of both top-down and bottom-up approaches, in which a converging layer is conceived to incorporate the latest technologies such as portal, process orchestration, Web services, service aggregations, business rule engine, and so forth. In the enterprise model, common business functionalities are built as shared services to be reused across lines of business as well as delivery channels, and the Internet channel-specific SOA is defined by applying the hybrid methodology. Finally, a holistic solution platform is introduced to address the key design artifacts in the implementation of service-oriented solutions. Challenges of conflicting specifications and immature cutting-edge technologies are also discussed in the context.