What is a Rule Engine Design Pattern?
A Rule(s) Engine Design Pattern or Rule-Based Design Pattern is a software architectural approach that dictates behavior of a system through predefined business rules or conditions. On a high-level, a rule engine design pattern has three components:
- A ruleset: a collection of business rules that determine what actions to take in various contexts.
- Input data: the context for which business rules are applied to.
- A rule(s) engine: the software that processes input data and executes the ruleset.
Rule engines enable an organization to manage automated business decisions separately from the system or application that acts upon those decisions. This gives the business side more control over these decisions, empowering business analysts and subject-matter experts the ability to test and modify changes on a lifecycle that’s independent of the software development life cycle. Over time, many rule engines have evolved into business rules management systems and then decision management platforms or decision engines that provide additional tools to further simplify the decision management process and enable organizations to leverage AI in decision making. We cover the more technical aspects of decision engine design in another post.
When to Use a Rule Engine Design Pattern
In general, a rule engine design pattern is best applied to scenarios involving:
- Operational decisions that occur is high volume and/or frequency and is likely to change over time
- Complex business logic involving multiple conditions and variables
- Regulatory compliance requirements that demand auditability
- Domain expert involvement in rule definition and maintenance
Benefits of a Rule Engine Design Pattern
Leveraging a rule engine enables organizations to achieve the following:
- Easier Maintenance: A rule engine separates business rules from the rest of the system or application code so that it can be managed independently.
- More Flexibility: As mentioned earlier, updates can occur on their own lifecycle. Organizations can not only adapt to market changes faster, but they can also test different strategies more frequently.
- Greater Scalability: For the most part, rule engines are designed to handle large numbers of rules. In addition, the same rules can be reused by multiple systems. Rather than replicating the business rules for every new application (which will increase maintenance), organizations simply need to integrate the rule engine to the new application.
- Better Governance: As business rules are centralized in one location, organizations can better audit business rules and ensure compliance. In addition, many rule engines have features like access control, versioning, and trace.
Rule Engine Applications
Organizations in various industries use rule engines for various applications. The most common use cases can be found in financial services for managing fraud and credit risk decisions. However, more and more organizations are finding new use cases for rule engines:
- In a previous post, we discussed how a global advisory, broking, and solutions company started using a rule engine to manage customer risk but later identified new applications in dynamic data capture and task management.
- In another post, we discussed how a leading custom battery manufacturer is leveraging a rule engine to expedite their design and quotation process.
- In this post, we’re going to focus on how a major global apparel client of ours is using our decision management platform SMARTS™.
Decision Management Use Cases for Apparel
Operations for our client are highly complex. They manage multiple product lines each with numerous SKUs, operate globally, and work with both individual and business customers. Through business rules, they’re able to more efficiently and effectively manage operational decisions in 3 areas:
- Invoicing: Given various conditions, how should a customer be invoiced?
- Logistics: Given various conditions, what is the most efficient and effective way to distribute products around the world?
- Merchandising: How to generate and validate the code for a product in a store and online?
Modernizing Rules Management with SMARTS™
Our client was looking to modernize their rule engine. They chose SMARTS™ because of our low-code capabilities. These enabled them to easily automate tasks and build custom interfaces to further simplify the decision management process. As a result, they were able to reduce their rules authoring lifecycle from over 6 months to under 3 weeks!
Learn more about Sparkling Logic’s SMARTS™ Data-Powered Decision Manager