文档介绍：A Decision Making Methodology in Support of the Business Rules
Lifecycle
Daniela Rosca* Sol Greenspant Mark ~eblowitzt Chris Wild*
Abstract requirements" is, for business rules, a rich -
The business rules that underlie an enterprise plex one, involving satisficing, tradeoffs, exceptions,
emerge as a new category of system requirements that or other coping strategies. The "implementation" (we
represent decisions about how to run the business, and prefer the term LLdeployment")of a business rule is not
which are characterized by their business-orientation so straightforward, certainly not just the usual mean-
and their propensity for change. In this paper, we ing of a system meeting its specifications.
introduce a decision making methodology which ad- The most demanding characteristic of business
dresses several aspects of the business rules lifecycle: rules is that the business is likely to want to change
acquisition, deployment and evolution. We describe a them. Business rules are formulated to have planned
meta-model for representing business rules in terms of consequences that contribute to the ess of the
an enterprise model, and also a decision support sub- business, and therefore it is expected that the rules
model for reasoning about and deriving the rules. A will be continually re-evaluated and subject to change
technique for automatically extracting business rules to improve the performance of the business. Busi-
from the decision structure is described and illustrated ness rules can also be generated by or in response to
using business rules examples inspired by the London external sources, such as regulatory bodies, the law,
Ambulance Service case study. A system based on the market forces, or physical realities. Since the business
metamodel has been implemented, including the ex- does not have control over these external forces, the
traction algorithm. enterprise must be prepared to change the bu