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Rule Engine

A Rule Engine is a Component which executes Business Rules which can be directly created or updated without going through the heavy classical development process.
The main advantage is “time to deploy Rules”.
So the Rule engine is well adapted to rules which often change like Pricing Rules.
Other advantages are Visibility on existing rules, and Simulations of new rules.

But isolating Rules supposes to answer some questions:

  • Target questions
    • How to interface the rule engine to the Legacy System?
    • How to find rules (for example when updating): the rules are ordered in a set which is independent from applications?
    • How to reduce the scope of data proposed for each rule?
    • How to offer an easy user interface?
    • How to test a rule?
    • How to provide good performances?
    • How to reuse existing rules?
    • How to test the application which calls the rule?
    • How to offer simulation tool?
  • Migration questions
    • How to find rules inside existing code?
    • How to replace existing rules by a call to the Rule Engine?

As Time to Market becomes a priority and Rule Engines becomes more popular, a new question arises: how to integrate the Rule Engine inside a more global application?
Example of “Product Factory” which allows marketing teams to directly create or modify Products by defining Product Structure, assembling Services and managing Rules like pricing rules, commission rules or eligibility rules, without the help of IT teams.

Most of the concepts developped on this website are further developped in our white papers. You can download any white paper freely. Please do not re-use without explicit permission.