Rule Validation Video

The Rule Manager will soon be enhanced with a new feature that allows the Interactive Rule Map as a Rule Debugger. See a video here: Rule Validation Video. It almost became an action movie :).

This is part one of providing Rule Validation (that is: testing your rules) with the Rule Manager.


Color legend for Rule:

• Green: Rule fired
• Red: Rule failed
• Orange: Rule is pending

Color legend for Term:

• Green: Term is assigned
• Orange: Term is unknown
  
  

How it works? We use the backward chaining algorithm to resolve a goal. The user can select any business term as a goal.

• When the user clicks resolve, the inference engine will try to resolve this goal by executing the rules.
• When a term is encountered that can not be derived from other rules, an ask dialog will be shown to the user. The user value will be stored into an internal table, so consecutive runs will first use this table before asking the user. Internally the rule manager supports defining restrictions on business terms. This allows the inference engine to show input options when asking a value for a term.

About the user data value table:

• The table can be cleared by clicking on 'Reset All Values' from the context menu.
• You can change the value of one particular term by selecting the 'Reset Term' on the Term context menu.
• Note: also business terms that are inferred by the inference engine can be overwritten by the user. Be careful with this because this would skip the backward-chaining of this rule branch.

13 years ago

Found my old research paper from 1994 "An object-oriented approach to knowledge representation in a biomedical domain". Looked like they scanned the contents of the original paper.

It's pretty outdated. Note that this was before the existence of Java or C#, but there was good old Smalltalk.

One thing is still relevant. The construction of a hybrid knowledge based system. Translated to 2007; the semantic web 3.0. Defining a clear terminological component (vocabulary) in order to make assertions from basic facts.

Importing Biztalk rules and export to Windows Workflow Foundation

The new Rule Manager (version 1.4.0.50) is released!



With just a few mouse clicks, the Rule Manager from Acumen Business imports a BizTalk rule policy and export the rules to the Windows Workflow Foundation format.



The export generates a complete Visual studio solutions. This includes the .rules file, the Business Object model and the code that calls Windows Worklow Engine.

And voila, here is the results of a CarDiagnosis example with the recommendation that I have to get 'Fuel'

It's just a console output, but you hopefully get the idea. It's an executable solution that can be incorporated into the IT infrastructure.

I don't think we can make it any easier.

What you need:

• Microsoft BizTalk 2006
• .NET 3.0 (this includes Windows Workflow Foundation)
• Acumen's Rule Manager with the BizTalk and Windows Workflow Foundation adapters

What you get:

• Your BizTalk rule policy converted to Windows Workflow Foundation. The best part is that the Windows Workflow Foundation is free and is included in the .NET 3.0 framework.

Business Rules for the Windows Workflow Foundation

If you like to see the latest version of the RuleManager with support for Microsoft Windows Workflow Foundation, you can request to see the product in action at the Business Rules Forum. Fill in the form here.



The image shows the imported DiscountRuleSet from the Microsoft Windows Worklow Foundation advanced policy example.

How to understand a large ruleset?

Peter Lin has a very valid concern :

My main caution to users is that no matter how nice the writing part is, how
does the tool make it easier to maintain and understand a large ruleset? Does it
have the ability to analyze the rules and show the relationship to the user?

At Acumen Business (where I work), we have addressed this issue by the introduction of the Interactive Rule Map. Sometimes also referred to as Rule Spider. This dynamic rulemap shows the direct dependencies of rules-to-terms and from terms-to-rules.

There is also a complete Rule Graph generation, however that will quickly loose it’s power when hundreds of rules are defined. The interactive rule map is an advanced browser that shows parts of the rule graph.

Currently we are doing some research to integrate the Rule Validation into the Interactive Rule Map. This allows step through debugging of the just the business rules. Our prototype is looking very promising.

What is missing in WWF rules

There is an interesting discussion going on how WWF rules is different from a BRMS solution. Although some comparisions are more related to the comparison with QuickRules.NET, there are quite a few valid points.

The argument list WWF Rules vs. BRMS rules will soon have to be rewritten. Acumen Busines is in the process of providing their tool components for WWF. This will include

• Rule Repository
• Rule Validation and Verification
• Rule Animation
• Rule Reporting

Stay tuned.

Decision Tree Editor

In previous posts I have mentioned the usage of Decision Trees or Decision Tables to represent business rules.

Acumen Business has developed an editor to create such Decision Tree rules. See the video here. The decision tree can be viewed in horizontal or vertical layout.

In order to effectively use such a format on rule execution; the runtime inference engine must support this kind of rule directly. Unfortunately BizTalk does not support this out-of-the-box. CA's RuleSp (or the new Aion) does support Decisions Tree natively in their inference engine. Corticon's rule sheets are also very similar to this Decision Tree format. Although it seems that it models a rule sheet like a decision table, the fact that certain branches can be overriden makes it more a decision tree. I'm pretty sure that Blaze and Ilog have something similar as well.

The article that started it all?

Business Process Trends had an article posted by Steve Minsky who gave the example:

• If a customer has good credit then assign a credit rate of 6
• If a customer has good credit then assign a credit rate of 8

These rules, however syntactically correct, contradict each other; they would cause the arbitrary assignment of a credit rating of “6” to some customers and “8” to others. This intermittent kind of business logic error is extremely difficult to diagnose with even state of the art testing tools. After the system goeslive, it may be months with unknown losses of customers or unprofitable accounts until the error is detected and corrected.

Extremely difficult yes, but Acumen Business has put this functionality inside their Rule Manager. Discover your anomalies in Biztalk policies with the brand new Rule Manager here.

Note: that rules that use facts from assemblies in the GAC are causing problems on the rule anomaly algorithms. This hopefully will be addressed soon.

Rule Animation

Business Rules Manager 1.4.0.20 showing the new enhancements in the Interactive Rule Map.

Discovery of new galaxies?

New Policy Verificator release

Acumen Business has just released the beta version of the new Policy Verificator that supports BizTalk 2006.

Major enhancements are made in the Interactive Rule Map (rule spider). There is a new free text search. And of course all the previous functions of Printing BizTalk Rules and Merging Vocabularies are available.

BizTalk v.s. Windows Workflow Foundation

I just got the MSDN in the snail mail box and was reading this morning about the new Windows Workflow Foundation (WWF). There is a strong similarity with Biztalk in regards to the Workflow part of BizTalk.

There are some other comments about this comparison. See Darren . Combine this with the news that Scott Woodgate has left the project, I wonder where the BizTalk product is heading to.

Brian Loesgen has published a nice comparison table of BizTalk features v.s. Windows Workflow Foundations.