A BRMS or Business Rule Management System is a software system used to
define, deploy, execute, monitor and maintain the variety and complexity of
decision logic that is used by operational systems within an
organization or enterprise. This logic, also referred to as business rules,
includes policies, requirements, and conditional statements that are used to
determine the tactical actions that take place in applications and systems.
Overview A BRMS includes, at minimum:
A repository, allowing decision logic to be externalized from core application
code Tools, allowing both technical
developers and business experts to define and manage decision logic
A runtime environment, allowing applications to invoke decision logic
managed within the BRMS and execute it using a business rules engine
The top benefits of a BRMS include: Reduced or removed reliance on IT
departments for changes in live systems. Although, QA and Rules testing would
still be needed in any enterprise system.
Increased control over implemented decision logic for compliance and better
business management The ability to express decision logic
with increased precision, using a business vocabulary syntax and graphical
rule representations Improved efficiency of processes through
increased decision automation Some disadvantages of the BRMS include:
Extensive subject matter expertise required for vendor specific products.
In addition to Object Oriented Analysis and Design practices, technical
developers must know how to write rules and integrate software with existing
systems Long development cycle due to rule
harvesting, integration with existing systems, security constraints, rule
migration and rule edit tracking. These offerings are never part of an out of
the box vendor solution. Reduced IT department reliance may never
be a reality due to continued introduction to new business rule
considerations or object model perturbations
The coupling of a BRMS vendor application to the business application
may be too tight to replace with another BRMS vendor application. This can lead
to cost to benefits issues. Most BRMS vendors have evolved from rule
engine vendors to provide business-usable software development
lifecycle solutions, based on declarative definitions of business
rules executed in their own rule engine. However, some vendors come from a
different approach. Rules in the repository are generally mapped to
decision services that are naturally fully compliant with the latest SOA, Web
Services, or other software architecture trends.
Related software approaches In a BRMS, a representation of business
rules maps to a software system for execution. A BRMS therefore relates to
model-driven engineering, such as the model-driven architecture of the Object
Management Group. It is no coincidence that many of the related standards come
under the OMG banner. A BRMS is a critical component for
Enterprise Decision Management as it allows for the transparent and agile
management of the decision-making logic required in systems developed using this
approach. A BRMS can also be combined with
Predictive Analytics and Optimization to create a Decision Management System
Associated standards The OMG Decision Model and Notation
standard is designed to standardize elements of business rules development,
specially decision table representations. There is also a
standard for a Java Runtime API for rule engines JSR-94.
Other standards include: OMG Business Motivation Model: A model
of how strategies, processes, rules, etc. fit together for business modeling
OMG SBVR: Targets business constraints as opposed to automating business
behavior OMG Production Rule Representation:
Represents rules for production rule systems that make up most BRMS'
execution targets OMG Decision Model and Notation:
Represents models of decisions, which are typically managed by a BRMS
RuleML provides a family of rule mark-up languages that could be used in a BRMS
and with W3C RIF it provices a family of related rule languages for rule
interchange in the W3C Semantic Web stack
Many standards, such as domain-specific languages, define their own
representation of rules, requiring translations to generic rule engines or
their own custom engines. Other domains, such as PMML, also define
rules. See also
BPMS DBMS
RDMS Business rules
Business rules approach Business rules engine
References ^ "Business Rule Management System.".
hartmannsoftware.com. Retrieved 2012-06-24.
^ Taylor, James. Decision Management Systems: A Practical Guide to Using
Business Rules and Predictive Analytics. Boston MA: Pearson Education. pp.
235–261. ISBN 978-0-13-288438-9. External links
Workshop summary paper: Six Views on the Business Rule Management System
Inference .NET based BRMS InRule .NET based BRMS
Corticon BRMS Report listing possible functionalities
of BRMS and tool vendors