C/S based rule management system to support business intelligence

Abstract

It is becoming more popular for the business owners to separate business rules from their workflow. The separation of business rules from business operational software is especially important for the business owners to modify their business rules frequently without the need of IT intervention.

This project aims to develop a client / server based rule management system to support business intelligence. The system shall allow the business owners to be able to review, modify and re-organize business rules, which will be eventually imposed by the server to control the business operations in the organization.

A client / server based rule mangement system is developed in Java using Jess as the Rule Engine. The entire system consists of a Java rule management interface, a central server hosting the reusable rules in MySQL and an e-commerce shopping cart website to demonstrate a possible type of application that can benefit from the system. By using the developed Java interface, a business owner can design business strategies, such as discount rules for e-commerce website, in human readable language. The conversion algorithm to convert human readable language into Jess syntax is designed to be flexible and scalable so that business owners can modify them for their businesses.