Applying Distributed Business Rules - The VIDRE Approach

Today\´s business processes are not static, they need to be adapted frequently to reflect changing business requirements. Several business process languages such as WS-BPEL have emerged for specifying business processes based on Web service technologies. Activities in such business processes are typically implemented as Web services by using modern programming languages. These services encapsulate the business logic in terms of application-specific code. This approach lacks flexibility in terms of capturing and executing the business rules that define how certain activities work and how decisions are made. Changing "hard-coded" business rules leads to changes in the service implementations and it cannot be done efficiently without redeploying the service which may affect running business processes. Therefore, we propose VIDRE a distributed service-oriented business rule engine, which enables business processes or enterprise applications to access business rules as easily as a database by exposing them as Web services. Furthermore, VIDRE enables the definition of distributed business rules, a novel feature allowing a distributed execution of rules