An Architectural Pattern to Implement Business Rules in Information Systems

Abstract

The use of business rules technologies to develop information systems has been advocated as a good strategy to provide more flexibility and keeping systems up to date. However, designing an architecture that allows systems to be rapidly adapted as business rules change over time remains a challenging activity. Based on the publish-subscribe pattern, we propose a flexible, scalable and loose-coupled architecture that accommodates implementations of business rules in information systems. Given the business rules of a system (defined using the Semantic of Business Vocabulary and Business Rules (SBVR)), we provide a method to automatically analyze and extract some data to guide the implementation of interactions with business rules engines, using the proposed architecture. Moreover, we analyzed the proposed architecture, using the architecture trade off analysis method (ATAM), in the light of certain features required by the business rules approach. This analysis demonstrated that the proposed architecture fulfills some key elements expected in the business rules implementations.