On the design of an advanced business rule engine

Business rules govern how well-managed companies perform every day. They are expected to be written in natural language because they are devised by business people. That makes it difficult to translate them automatically into executable rules that can be integrated into typical information systems. Our industrial and academic research concludes that the current tools have a number of problems, namely: many of them do not pay any attention to the SBVR standard; some of them are not multi-language; most of them cannot achieve perfect parsing accuracy; some of them are not domain agnostic; some of them use proprietary technologies; some of them do not produce executable rules; and none supports exploratory what-if analyses natively. In this article, we present Tier-Rules, which is a system that overcomes the previous problems. We also report on an industrial case study that helps illustrate it in practice.