Towards a distributed service-oriented business rules system

Abstract

Businesses are changing rapidly and organizations tend to act worldwide and are increasingly becoming distributed over the continents. As a consequence, distributed software systems have to keep track with rapidly changing markets. Business rules provide support for capturing some knowledge that changes frequently. Current business rule systems manage and execute business rules, however, typically lack support for increasingly distributed software systems, in particular, with respect to flexibility and reuse of business rules across distributed rule engines. In this paper we propose a service-oriented distributed business rules system that manages and deploys business rules to various business rule engines. Furthermore, we present the design and some implementation aspects of a service-oriented business rules system based on WS-coordination. The system supports management and deployment of business rules to various business rules engines. Furthermore, we present a framework that unifies the access to several heterogeneous business rules engines, and we propose a solution that automatically generates and provisions Web services for executing business rules managed by a business rule engine.