Business Decision Models

Business decision modeling is oriented to subject matter experts who want to build and maintain decision models that automatically produce decisions for repetitive operational business problems. A decision model usually has a clearly defined business goal, subgoals, and the logic that specifies these goals. OpenRules allows a business user to use Excel to specify:

  1. Business Glossary with different goals, subgoals, and other decision variables distributed between different business concepts
  2. Business Logic represented using standard Decision Tables and other forms of executable business rules
  3. Test Cases that allow the model authors to make sure that their decision model produce the expected decisions.

The decision tables are created based on the standardized formats predefined by OpenRules following the OMG standard “Decision Model and Notation (DMN)”.

This guide introduces a new, goal-oriented approach that essentially simplifies practical decision modeling.

Let’s just summarize the implementation steps we covered today:

  • Create Glossary with a top-level goal
  • Specify the goal using decision tables. It may identify new subgoals and decision variable. Add them to the glossary
  • Specify subgoals using decision tables until there are no unspecified subgoals left
  • Create Test Cases
  • Build the decision model (with a simple double-click on “build.bat”)
  • Executed Test Cases (with a simple double-click on “build.bat”)
  • Analyze the execution results using the generated HTML reports.