White Paper. ILOG JRules: Leading the Way in Business Rule Management Systems

Transcription

1 White Paper : Leading the Way in Business Rule Management Systems

2 : Leading the Way in Business Rule Management Systems White Paper ILOG, March 2005 Do not duplicate without permission. ILOG, CPLEX and their respective logotypes are registered trademarks. All other company and product names are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective holders. The material presented in this document is summary in nature, subject to change, not contractual and intended for general information only and does not constitute a representation.

3 Contents Audience... 4 Applicable Versions Introduction The Five Strengths... 5 Strength 1: Comprehensive Feature Set Tools Rule Languages... 7 Repository... 8 BRE Server Rule Engine Strength 2: Reliability...10 Rule execution speed A Scalable BRMS Dedication to standards Strength 3: Customizability and Extensibility Customization services Extension services Strength 4: Track Record Stability of ILOG Blue Chip references Growing customer base Strength 5: Complete Offering Conclusion Additional Resources ILOG S.A. All rights reserved

4 Audience This document is intended for those who wish to learn more about business rule management and business rule management systems, and to understand why JRules is the leading BRMS available. Applicable Versions This document covers 5.0.x 2004 ILOG S.A. All rights reserved

5 Introduction ILOG has worked for many years to make the market-leading business rule management system (BRMS). JRules makes business rule management practical by providing innovative tools to author, deploy and manage business rules across the enterprise. This is why it has become an essential part of the IT infrastructures of hundreds of businesses worldwide, and the list of customers continues to grow with each passing quarter. reputation has resulted in the BRMS s inclusion in the SD Times 100 and the Crossroads A-List. It has received the Intelligent Enterprise Editor s Choice Award and Software Development magazine s Productivity Award, among other top industry honors. Major IT research firms recognize as a market leader. Gartner has listed it in the Magic Quadrant for Business Rule Engines in every version of the Magic Quadrant, and Giga, Butler Group and Bloor Research all recommend specifically for business rule management. IDC identifies ILOG as the overall leader in market share for the BRMS market. Why does hold this commanding position among business rule management systems? Put simply, has strengths that taken together are unsurpassed in the marketplace. The Five Strengths strengths begin with its comprehensive feature set. provides tools and rule languages that help policy managers, business analysts and developers author, deploy and manage business rules. It also includes a repository to store and protect business rules, a powerful rule engine to execute rules, and an extensive Java library to define and extend rule execution and management environments. Another major strength is reliability. The combination of high performance and robustness make the product s rule engine the one to depend on with mission-critical business applications, regardless of the throughput requirements. All the components in are based on the latest standards for J2EE, XML, Web services and even rule engines (e.g., JSR94). It is designed to fit into a modern computing environment seamlessly and efficiently, so there is no need for a custom or proprietary interface or adapter ILOG S.A. All rights reserved

6 is customizable and extensible to an unprecedented degree. Practically every feature provided out of the box can be customized. The tools, repository and engine are all supported with rich APIs, and frameworks that enable their extension programmatically. has achieved an impressive track record over the last several years. A contributing factor is the stability of its maker -- ILOG --both from a financial and an organizational standpoint. There are also its blue-chip references. is employed across the enterprise at leading companies around the world in finance, government, telecommunications, insurance, e-businesses and manufacturing. And this list is growing fast. fifth major strength is its complete offering. is not just software and documentation, although the software is award winning, and its documentation comprehensive and educational. ILOG provides maintenance services and technical support, classroom and onsite training, solution frameworks and product consulting. ILOG provides all the software and services needed to successfully apply business rule management. Strength 1: Comprehensive Feature Set provides tools and rule languages that help policy managers, business analysts and developers author, deploy, and manage business rules. It also includes a repository to store and protect business rules; a powerful rule engine to execute rules; and an extensive Java library to define and extend the rule execution and management environments. Each of these major component areas is rich with features. Tools Feature Ruleflow Decision Table Editor Decision Table Designer Decision Tree Editor Decision Tree Designer Graphical Business Object Model Editor Description Orchestrate the execution of rule packages using UML Author and maintain rules as decision tables Make templates for decision tables Author and maintain rules as decision trees Make templates for decision trees Diagram objects manipulated by rules using UML 2004 ILOG S.A. All rights reserved

7 Consistency Checking Rule Validation Query Plug-In Architecture Repository Explorer Business Object Model Explorer Template Designer Template Editor Syntactic Rule Editor Web Rule Editor Property Sheet Profiler Debugger Tracer Identify broken or redundant rules Automatically check rule syntax Search for and update anything in the repository Work with only the tools you need; hide the ones you don t need Browse and select rules, templates, queries, decision tables, Ruleflow and more Browse and select objects manipulated by rules Create rule templates Author, read and update template-based rules Author, read and update rules on your desktop Author, read and update rules through a Web browser View and edit rule properties Evaluate the runtime performance of a rule set Debug rules, decision tables and Ruleflow as they are executed by the rule engine Monitor execution events as they occur Rule Languages Feature Description Author rules using natural language Business Action Language (BAL) syntax Author rules using Java- or XML-like ILOG Rule Language (IRL) syntax Business Rule Language Definition Customize the provided rule languages or Framework create your own Java Language Integration Use Java expressions directly in the IRL Include time-based conditions and actions Temporal Expressions in rules Author rules in English, French, Japanese Internationalization and other languages 2004 ILOG S.A. All rights reserved

8 Repository Feature Rule Versioning Permission Management Rule History Persistence Locking SCC Integration Description Assign versions to rules and decision tables Control access to rules and tools View the history of changes made to rules and rule properties Store rules, rule properties, decision tables, Ruleflow, templates and more in files or database management systems Automatically coordinate multiuser collaboration on rule authoring and management Use third-party SCC tools to store and retrieve repository artifacts BRE Server Feature Description J2EE Components Integrated suite of components for executing business rules on production J2EE application servers and databases. Management Web-based system administration console and Java Management Beans. Integration with Java Management Bean tools such as IBM Tivoli or HP OpenView. Builder Integration Hot-deployment and packaging of business rules from JRules Builder. AS Integration Powerful integration with the underlying J2EE Application Server for cache management and configuration. Remote Debugging Interactive, remote debugging of rulesets deployed to the BRES from Rule Builder JIT code generation Safe Just-In-Time generation of Java bytecode from rulesets Ruleset Persistence RDBMS used to persist rulesets in 2004 ILOG S.A. All rights reserved

9 Automation Tools production Suite of automation tools for developers and system administrators to perform all major management tasks through scripts or application build files Rule Engine Feature Inferencing Execution Mode Sequential Execution Mode XML Binding Web Service Binding Database Binding Context Pooling Support for JSR94 Ruleset Update Management JIT Bytecode Generation Remote Debugging Conflict Resolution Multithreaded Architecture Truth Maintenance System Temporal Reasoning Support for Ruleflow Description Apply sophisticated pattern-matching algorithms to arbitrarily execute complex rule sets Maximize execution speed for simple rule sets Read and write XML files directly Invoke external Web services directly from rules Connection to DBMS facilitated Manage performance using pools of rule engines Call the JRule engine by using the JSR94 standard rule engine interface Update rule sets on the fly without restarting Boost performance by automatically translating rule sets into Java bytecode Enable remote connection of debugging tool for embedded application diagnosis Automatically resolve rule conflicts during execution by using refraction, priority and version Share objects across multiple threads Use logical objects to automatically assert and retract conditional hypotheses Incorporate time as a parameter during rule execution Execute Ruleflow and rules in the same engine 2004 ILOG S.A. All rights reserved

10 Strength 2: Reliability Another primary reason why ILOG customers select over other BRMSs is its reliability. The three aspects of reliability most cited are rule execution speed, rule engine robustness, and a dedication to industry standards apparent throughout the software. Rule execution speed In a recent lab test, ILOG personnel measured the execution speed of the ILOG JRules rule engine. The rule set for the test consisted of 1,500 rules. Each rule used five conditions to assign one of five actions to a sales item, based on the characteristics of the item. A total of 10,000 sales items were included in the test. Three execution modes were run in the test: inferencing, inferencing with bytecode generation, and sequential. Rule execution by inferencing used the highly advanced RETE algorithm to efficiently match rule conditions to the sales items. During inferencing, all the rules were reactive to data change and became applicable when the conditions were verified. A rule selection strategy was used to select the rules to execute. Inferencing with bytecode generation added a just-in-time optimization step that translated test evaluations into efficient Java bytecode before execution. (Bytecode generation is an optional enhancement for the inferencing mode.) Sequential execution applied a brute-force approach to the rule evaluation. In this mode, rules were evaluated and executed in a predefined order, and the rule selection strategy was discarded. Usually, the characteristics of a rule set make it executable with either inferencing or sequential mode, but not both. In this case, the test r ule set was designed so that both inferencing and sequential exec ution modes could be applied and compared. Execution Mode Execution Speed (rules per second) Inferencing 22.7K Inferencing w/ bytecode generation 68.6K Sequential 384K K = Thousand (Tests conducted on a Sun Blade 1000 running Solaris 8 with 1.5 GBytes of memory) Running the test produced an execution speed of 22,700 rules per second for pure inferencing. Adding bytecode generation produced a 3X increase to 68,600 rules per 2004 ILOG S.A. All rights reserved

11 second. Switching to sequential mode increased performance enormously, to an execution speed of 384,000 rules per second. A Scalable BRMS is being successfully applied across business applications varying greatly in operating profile and performance requirements. This point is illustrated in the following table of examples taken from real deployments by customers: Application Type Rules Operating Profile Straight Through Processing: Data 1K 2-2.5K orders/day, 2M Validation, Confirmation, Order rules/day Routing and Message Transformation Asset Management: Validation and K validations/hour Consolidation Credit Qualification K records/sec, 130K rules/sec Automatic Trading rules/sec Automatic Trading trades/sec Order Validation and Routing 60 2K orders/day Mediation 6K 10M transactions/hour Claim Assignment K claims/day Welfare Benefit Eligibility 300 >300 rules/sec Loan Acquisition and Servicing 200 5M loans/day Claim Validation and Routing claims/sec, 1M claims/month Transaction Validation and Routing 8K 120K transactions/day Order Management 1.8K 20K transactions/day Content Routing K-250K messages/day Automobile Financing 100 Up to 40K requests/day Reservation Data cleansing 1.6K 16K reservations/day K = Thousand M = Million has been proven stable and reliable from proof of concept to deployment of mission-critical business applications operating in a 24x7x365 environments. Dedication to standards conforms to the current and emerging standards of the Object Management Group (OMG), Java Community Process (JCP) and World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), for: 2004 ILOG S.A. All rights reserved

12 Repositories Rule engines XML Web services Web Rule Builder Standards implemented by include: Standard Version Standard source Standard type Implemented in ILOG JRules by MOF 1.4 OMG Object model Bu siness Object Model specification XMI 1.1 OMG XML grammar Repository file persistence JMI 1.0 JCP API Repository Model API JSR JCP API Rule engine server Standards supported by include: Standard Version Standard source Standard type Supported in by JDK 1.3.1, 1.4.1, JCP API All modules JDBC 2.0 JCP API Repository database persistence J2EE 1.3 JCP API Rule engine EJB deployment EJB 1.1, 2.0 JCP API Rule engine EJB deployment JAXP 1.1 JCP API All XML parsers, XSLT invocation XML Schema 1.0 W3C XML XML binding grammar WSDL 1.1 W3C XML grammar Web service binding, Rule engine deployment SOAP 1.1 W3C XML Web service 2004 ILOG S.A. All rights reserved

13 grammar binding, Rule engine deployment Servlet 2.2, 2.3 JCP API Web Rule Builder JSP CSS 1.1, JCP W3C API Gram mar Web Rule Builder Web Rule Builder look and feel Streng th 3: Customizability and Extensibility provides mechanisms for customizing and extending all its components, including its tools, languages, repository and engine. The customization services make it easy to adjust the performance, functionality and appearance of components provided with, while the extension services make it possible to add capabilities that are not provided by default with ILOG JRules. Customization services can be customized in several ways: Installing or uninstalling tools using a plug-in architecture Changing configuration properties Customizing the look and feel of Web components via CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) Extension services can be extended in several ways: Adding a custom tool or function using the plug-in architecture Adding custom functionality via Application Programming Interface Adding a custom business rule language Embedding Web components in custom user interfaces Embedding Java Beans in custom Java applications 2004 ILOG S.A. All rights reserved

14 Strength 4: Track Record Stability of ILOG For more than 10 years, ILOGʹs innovative enterprise-class software components and services have helped companies maximize their business agility and improve operating efficiency. Over 1,000 global corporations and more than 300 leading software vendors rely on ILOGʹs business rule, optimization and visualization technologies to achieve dramatic returns on investment, create market-defining products and services, and sharpen their competitive edge. ILOG has had the same chief executive since the company s inception, and its employee turnover rate is well below the industry average. For R&D in particular, it is well below 5 percent. Blue Chip references Here are what CIOs of major companies have to say about : We selected because of its rich user interface, and its business approach that puts the power of the customization in the user s hands. The performance and scalability of were other key reasons. Liz Shuttleworth, CIO, Radian Guaranty Sometimes I walk out of my office and see a group of customers actively playing at a time that used to be slow. And I say to myself, they wouldn t be here now if it weren t for the one-off promotions I can do with our rules system. Tim Stanley, CIO, Harrah s Entertainment Using, we will have a solution that will scale as our business requirements change while supporting CitiStreetʹs need to exchange and manage employee information in real time. - Andy Marsh, CIO, Total Benefits Outsourcing, CitiStreet Growing customer base ILOG s customer base for has experienced double-digit growth in the last three years, with no letup in sight. It includes EBay, Freddie Mac,, Disney, Sabre and many other leading Global 2000 companies, and governments worldwide ILOG S.A. All rights reserved

15 Strength 5: Complete Offering includes more than just award-winning software and comprehensive, instructional documentation. It is also fully backed with maintenance and support services, classroom and onsite training, and solution frameworks and consulting from our professional services. Together, they add up to a complete solution for business rule management. Conclusion leads in the business rule management marketplace because of its strengths: 1. Comprehensive Feature Set 2. Reliability 3. Extensibility and Customizability 4. Track Record 5. Completeness of Offering Taken together, these five strengths make the right choice in BRMS. Additional Resources More information on, including datasheets, specifications, case studies and white papers, can be obtained from an ILOG Sales Representative near you or the Web pages, at ILOG S.A. All rights reserved