ILOG JRules - Stanford Logic Group

Leading the Way in Business Rule

Management Systems

ILOG JRules:

White Paper

ILOG JRules: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.

ILOG Business Rules ILOG JRules

Contents

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Growing customer base................................................................................................. 14 Strength 5: Complete Offering .......................................................................................... 15 Conclusion ........................................................................................................................... 15 Additional Resources ......................................................................................................... 15

Audience ......................................................................................................... ..Applicable ILOG JRules Versions................................................................ ..Introduction.................................................................................................... ..The Five Strengths ......................................................................................... ..Strength 1: Comprehensive Feature Set...................................................... ..

Tools............................................................................................................ ..Rule Languages ......................................................................................... ..Repository ................................................................................................. ..BRE Server................................................................................................. ..Rule Engine............................................................................................... ..

Strength 2: Reliability ................................................................................... ..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 ............................................................................ ..

© 2004 ILOG S.A. All rights reserved. - 3 -


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 ILOG JRules Versions This document covers ILOG JRules 5.0.x



Introduction

ing business ent practical

les across is 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

Times 100 and the Crossroads A-List. It has received the Intelligent Enterprise Editor’s Choice

ong other

er has listed usiness Rule Engines in every version of the Magic

Quadrant, and Giga, Butler Group and Bloor Research all recommend ILOG JRules erall leader

arket.

hold this commanding position among business rule management systems? Put simply, ILOG JRules has strengths that – taken together – are unsurpassed in the marketplace.

es’ strengths begin with its comprehensive feature set. ILOG JRules provides tools and rule languages that help policy managers, business analysts and

epository ules, and an

anagement

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 ILOG JRules 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 has worked for many years to make ILOG JRules the market-leadrule management system (BRMS). JRules makes business rule managemby providing innovative tools to author, deploy and manage business ruthe enterprise. Th

each passing quarter. ILOG JRules’ reputation has resulted in the BRMS’s inclusion in the SD

Award and Software Development magazine’s Productivity Award, amtop industry honors. Major IT research firms recognize ILOG JRules as a market leader. Gartnit in the Magic Quadrant for B

specifically for business rule management. IDC identifies ILOG as the ovin market share for the BRMS m

Why does ILOG JRules

The Five Strengths ILOG JRul

developers author, deploy and manage business rules. It also includes a rto store and protect business rules, a powerful rule engine to execute rextensive Java library to define and extend rule execution and menvironments. Another major strength is ILOG JRules



ILOG JRules is customizable and extensible to an unprecedented degreeevery feature provided “out of the box” can be customized. The toolsand engine are all sup

. Practically , repository

ported with rich APIs, and frameworks that enable their

ral years. A ncial and an G JRules is

the enterprise at leading companies around the world in finance, government, telecommunications, insurance, e-businesses and manufacturing. And

is not just ng, and its

educational. ILOG provides maintenance services and technical support, classroom and onsite training, solution frameworks

are and services needed to successfully apply business rule management.

rs, business ts 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 an extensive Java library to define and extend the rule execution and

management environments. Each of these major component areas is rich with es.

Tools

extension programmatically. ILOG JRules has achieved an impressive track record over the last sevecontributing factor is the stability of its maker -- ILOG --both from a finaorganizational standpoint. There are also its blue-chip references. ILOemployed across

this list is growing fast. ILOG JRules’ fifth major strength is its complete offering. ILOG JRulessoftware and documentation, although the software is award winnidocumentation comprehensive and

and product consulting. ILOG provides all the softw

Strength 1: Comprehensive Feature Set ILOG JRules provides tools and rule languages that help policy manageanalys

rules; and

featur

Feature Description

Ruleflow Orchestrate the execution of rule packages using UML

Decision Table Editor as decision

les Author and maintain rulestab

Decision Table Designer Make templates for decision tables

Decision Tree Editor Author and maintain rules as decision trees

Decision Tree Designer Make templates for decision trees Graphical Business Object Model Editor

Diagram objects manipulated by rules using UML



Consistency Checking undant rules Identify broken or redAutomatically check rule s

Query Search for and update anything in the repository

Plug-In Architecture eed; hide

Work with only the tools you nthe ones you don’t need

Repository Explorer Browse and select rules, temp

r rules Browse and

Template Designer Create rule templates

rules

Syntactic Rule Editor or, read and update rules on your Auth

desktop

Web Rule Editor through a

Web browser Author, read and update rules

View and edit rule properties Evaluate the runtime perfor

Rule Validation yntax

lates, queries, decision tables, Ruleflow and more

Business Object Model Explore select objects manipulated by

Template Editor Author, read and update template-based

Property Sheet

Profiler mance of a rule

set

Debugger Debug rules, decision tables and Ruleflow as they are executed by the rule engine

Tracer Monitor execution events as they occur

Rule Languages

Feature Description

Business Action Language (BA rules using natural language

L) syntax Author

ILOG Rule Language (IRL) L-like

syntax Author rules using Java- or XM

tion Customize the provided rule Business Rule Language DefiniFramework

languages or create your own

Java Language Integration Use Java expressions directly in the IRL

Temporal Expressions Include time-based conditions and actions in rules

Internationalization Author rules in English, French, Japanese and other languages



Repository

Description

Feature Assign versions to rutables

Permission Management cess to rules and tools Control ac

Rule History de to rules View the history of changes ma

and rule properties

Persistence

Store rules, rule propertiRuleflow, templates anddataAutomatically coordinate mucollaboration on

Rule Versioning les and decision

es, decision tables, more in files or

base management systems

Locking

ltiuser rule authoring and

management

SCC Integration Use third-party SCC tools to store and retrieve repository artifacts

BRE Server

Feature Description Integrated suite of componentexecuting businessJ2EE application server

system admand Java Management Beans.with Java ManagemenIBM Tivoli or HP Op

Builder Integration ing of ilder.

Hot-deployment and packagbusiness rules from JRules BuPowerfulJ2EE Application Serve

J2EE Components s for rules on production

s and databases. Management Web-based inistration console

Integration t Bean tools such as

enView.

AS Integration integration with the underlying r 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 byte-

code from rulesets Ruleset Persistence RDBMS used to persist rulesets in



production Suite of automation tools for and system administrators to

Automation Tools developers perform all

major management tasks through scripts or application build files

ule Engine

Feature

R

Description

Inferencing Execution Mode

atching algorithms to arbitrarily execute complex Apply sophisticated pattern-m

rule sets

Sequential Execution Mode mple rule

sets Maximize execution speed for si

XML Binding files directly Read and write XML

Web Service Binding directly from

rules Invoke external Web services

Database Binding S facilitated Connection to DBM

Context Pooling Manage performance usinen

g pools of rule gines

Support for JSR94 Call the JRule engine by standard rule engine interf

using the JSR94 ace

Ruleset Update Management without Update rule sets “on the fly”

restarting

JIT Bytecode Generation cally

translating rule sets into Java bytecode Boost performance by automati

Enable remote connectiontool for embedded application

Conflict Resolution

ule conflicts during ity and

n

Automatically resolve rexecution by using refraction, priorversioShare objects across multiple t

Remote Debugging of debugging

diagnosis

Multithreaded Architecture hreads

Truth Maintenance System Use logical objects to automatically assert and retract conditional hypotheses

Temporal Reasoning Incorporate time as a parameter during rule execution

Support for Ruleflow Execute Ruleflow and rules in the same engine



Strength 2: Reliability

ther BRMSs ability. The three aspects of reliability most cited are rule execution speed,

rule engine robustness, and a dedication to industry standards apparent throughout

f the ILOG JRules rule engine. The rule set for the test consisted of 1,500 rules. Each rule used

sed on the he test.

th bytecode ly advanced

algorithm to efficiently match rule conditions to the sales items. During able when

the rules to

t

. (Bytecode nhancement for the inferencing mode.)

tion. In this and the rule

ategy was discarded. Usually, the characteristics of a rule set mak ith either inferencing or seq s case, the test r was designed so that bot ution modes could lied and compared.

Execution Mode Execution Speed (rules per second)

Another primary reason why ILOG customers select ILOG JRules over ois its reli

the software.

Rule execution speed In a recent lab test, ILOG personnel measured the execution speed o

five conditions to assign one of five actions to a sales item, bacharacteristics of the item. A total of 10,000 sales items were included in t Three execution modes were run in the test: inferencing, inferencing wigeneration, and sequential. Rule execution by inferencing used the highRETEinferencing, all the rules were reactive to data change and became applicthe conditions were verified. A rule selection strategy was used to selectexecute.

Inferencing with bytecode generation added a just-in-time optimization step thatranslated test evaluations into efficient Java bytecode before executiongeneration is an optional e Sequential execution applied a brute-force approach to the rule evaluamode, rules were evaluated and executed in a predefined order,selection str

e it executable wuential mode, but not both. In thi ule seth inferencing and sequential exec be app

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



second. Switching to sequential mode increased performance enormexecution speed of 384,000 rules per second.

ously, to an

MS

ns varying

s illustrated OG JRules

ers: ype ing Profile

A Scalable BR

ILOG JRules is being successfully applied across business applicatiogreatly in operating profile and performance requirements. This point iin the following table of examples taken from real deployments by ILcustomApplication T Rules OperatStraight Through ProcessiValidation, Confirmation, Orde

ng: Data r

orma

rs/day, 2M rules/day

Routing and Message Transf tion

1K 2-2.5K orde

Asset Management: Validation and 300 300K validations/hour Consolidation Credit Qualification 8K records/sec, 130K rules/sec 50 2.Automatic Trading les/sec 30 15 ruAutomatic Trading 120 50 trades/sec Order Validation and Routing ers/day 60 2K ordMediation 6K 10M transactions/hour Claim Assignment 450 225K claims/day Welfare Benefit Eligibility s/sec 300 >300 rule

200 5M Claim Validation and Routing /sec, 1M

nth 360 0.25 claims

claims/moTransaction Validation and Routin ions/day g 8K 120K transactOrder Management 1.8K 20K transa

Loan Acquisition and Servicing loans/day

ctions/day Content Routing 15 150K-250K messages/day Automobile Financing 100 Up to 40K requests/day Reservation Data cleansing 1.6K 16K reservations/day

K = Thousand M = Million ILOG JRules 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

ILOG JRules conforms to the current and emerging standards of the Object Management Group (OMG), Java Community Process (JCP) and World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), for:



• Repositories • Rule engines • XML

ices eb Rule Builder

ted by ILOG JRules include:

source type Implemented in ILOG

JRules by

• Web serv• W

Standards implemen

Standard Version Standard Standard

M 1.4 G odel specification

siness del OF OM Object m Bu Object Mo

I XML r ry file ce

Re ry Mode

upport

XM 1.1 OMG gramma Repositopersisten

JMI 1.0 JCP API posito l API JSR-94 1.0 JCP API Rule engine server

Standards supported by ILOG JRules include:

Standard Version Standard source

Standard type

S ed in ILOG JRules by

JDK 1.3.1, 1.4.1, JCP API All modules 1.4.2

JDBC 2.0 JCP API Repository base

tence datapersis

J2EE JC API ule engine EJB deployment

1.3 P R

EJB 1.1, 2.0 JC API Rule engine EJB deployment

P

JAXP 1.1 JC API ML parsers, SLT invocation

P All XX

XML Schema

W XML grammar

binding 1.0 3C XML

WSDL 1.1 W3C XML grammar

Web service binding, Rule engine deployment

SOAP 1.1 W3C XML Web service



gram ng, engine

ployment

mar bindiRule de

Servlet 2.2, 2.3 JC Web Rule Builder P API P API

mar Web Rulelo

Str th 3: miz ilit Extensibili

ing and ex

JSP 1.1, 1.2 JC Web Rule Builder CSS 2 W3C Gram Builder

ok and feel

eng Custo ab y and ty

ILOG JRules provides mechanisms for customiz tending 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 ILOG JRules, while the extension services

default with ILOG JRules.

• Installing or uninstalling tools using a plug-in architecture tion properties ok and feel of ILOG JRules Web components via CSS

ILO ed in several ways:

• Adding a custom tool or function using the plug-in architecture • Adding custom functionality via ILOG JRules Application Programming

Interface • Adding a custom business rule language • Embedding ILOG JRules Web components in custom user interfaces • Embedding ILOG JRules Java Beans in custom Java applications

make it possible to add capabilities that are not provided by

Customization services

ILOG JRules can be customized in several ways:

• Changing configura• Customizing the lo

(Cascading Style Sheets)

Extension services

G JRules can be extend



Strength 4: Track Record

Stability of ILOG

For more than 10 years, ILOGʹs innovative enterprise-class software components ximize their business agility and improve

e e than 300 leading tion and visualization

technologies to achieve dramatic returns on investment, create market-defining en their competitive edge. ILOG has had the same

ive since the company’s inception, and its employee turnover rate is well erage. For R&D in particular, it is well below 5 percent.

ere other key reasons.”

ian Guaranty

omers actively playing at a time that used to be slow. And I say to myself,

romotions I

y, CIO, Harrah’s Entertainment

“Using ILOG JRules, we will have a solution that will scale as our treetʹs need to

e.” itiStreet

Growing customer base

ILOG’s customer base for ILOG JRules 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.

and services have helped companies maop rating efficiency. Over 1,000 global corporations and morsoftware vendors rely on ILOGʹs business rule, optimiza

products and services, and sharpchief executbelow the industry av

“Blue Chip” references Here are what CIOs of major companies have to say about ILOG JRules:

“We selected ILOG JRules 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 ILOG JRules w

– Liz Shuttleworth, CIO, Rad

“Sometimes I walk out of my office and see a group of cust

they wouldn’t be here now if it weren’t for the one-off pcan do with our rules system.”

– Tim Stanle

business requirements change while supporting CitiSexchange and manage employee information in real tim - Andy Marsh, CIO, Total Benefits Outsourcing, C



St ILO oftware and comprehensive,

ructional documentation. It is also fully backed with maintenance and support services, classroom and onsite training, and solution frameworks and consulting

ces. Together, they add up to a complete solution for business rule management.

Conclusion

ILOG JRules leads in the business rule management marketplace because of its

3. Extensibility and Customizability 4. Track Record

eteness of Offering

BRMS.

s

More information on ILOG JRules, including datasheets, specifications, case studies e near you or

the ILOG JRules Web pages, at www.ilog.com/products/jrules.

rength 5: Complete Offering

G JRules includes more than just award-winning sinst

from our professional servi

strengths:

1. Comprehensive Feature Set 2. Reliability

5. Compl

Taken together, these five strengths make ILOG JRules the right choice in

Additional Resource

and white papers, can be obtained from an ILOG Sales Representativ


Documents

ILOG JRules - Stanford Logic Group