The behavior of business processes is governed by business rules. They determine how activities are carried out and what the final status should be. So what makes the graphical Business Rules approach of Visual Rules special and how does it work?

Business Knowledge

Detailed knowledge of business processes, heuristics, and formulas for calculating key business data represents a decisive part of a company’s business know-how. This knowledge typically consists of declarative and procedural components. It can generally be expressed in text form, and is thus also explicit.

Knowledge and Rules

Explicit knowledge with declarative and procedural components is ideal for modeling as flow rules. In order to depict business logic, workflows, and layouts in such a form, a basic framework of decision rules (IF-THEN constructs) is expanded using additional elements (such as calling up a service or function, describing a user interaction, or handling an exception).

It is particularly logical to use flow rules when the business knowledge is already available in a structured form or if it is of practical use to structure it by its flow or hierarchy. For the simple exploration of large quantities of data or the evaluation or processing of implicit experiential knowledge, flow rules alone will not suffice. However, they can simply be augmented with additional services and work steps and so expanded into hybrid applications.

Representing and Processing Rules

In general, explicit knowledge can be presented using natural-language text, using mathematical and/or logical formulas, or graphically using various symbols. These three methods differ primarily in terms of their interpretation and precision. Most people find text easier to understand than formulas, while a graphical representation is often particularly intuitive and easily understood.

When a number of decision rules for a particular dataset are always to be executed in the same order, and when the processing of this same dataset should always lead to the same result (deterministic processing), these rules can be modeled and visualized as a decision tree or decision table. This approach is particularly advantageous because it combines the benefits of the three above-mentioned methods of representation: the intuitiveness and clarity of symbols, the precision of formulas, and the legibility of text.

State Flow Modeling

Visual Rules Modeler provides very closely interacting capabilities for modeling both rules and states. Once the states are defined, the state transitions can be determined by a set of transition rules. The code generator converts the flow models for both states and rules into Java code. The generated code seamlessly integrates into target applications and provides all the capabilities necessary to conveniently embed and execute rules and states.

Concept implemented with Visual Rules Modeler

Visual Rules DatabaseIntegrator: Direct access to metadata of database

Visual Rules WebModeler: Web-based rules modeling 

Visual Rules Team Platform: Team-based rules modeling

Quick Facts

Modeling rules in the form of decision trees or tables is an excellent approach for:

• Types of knowledge: explicit, declarative, procedural, structured, domain-independent
• Types of rules: data-driven, heuristic, deterministic, hierarchical

Advantages of this approach:

• Easy to read like text
• Clear thanks to graphical, symbolic language
• Precise thanks to familiar formula elements