Defining DMN Knowledge and Information Requirements Automatically

Knowledge and Information Requirements are essential components of the current version of the DMN standard, which defines them in the section 6.2.2 as follows:

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Calculating Aggregated Values for Collections of Business Objects

The latest DMCommunity.org Challenge “Classify Department Employees” deals with calculation of aggregated values for arrays of business objects such as Employees. Below I describe an OpenRules solution for this challenge.

Book “DMN in Action with OpenRules” – Free Chapters

Based on the growing interest in the book “DMN in Action with OpenRules“, we decided to make the first 3 chapters available for free. Please click here to read/download them in the PDF format. You also may download the entire book from Amazon for just $9.95 – the price includes a free download of OpenRules evaluation software.

Transforming DMN XML to OpenRules

OpenRules already can read and execute decision models represented in the DML XML format with certain restrictions. The new release will be more powerful in this respect. To test new DMN-to-OpenRules capabilities I decided to implement DMCommunity’s June-2017 Challenge using the DMN Modeling tool from Trisotech that allows non-technical people to create DMN-compliant decision models and import them to the DMN XML format. My objective was to create DMN XML for the Loan Origination problem described in the Section 11 of the DMN specification and then execute this DMN XML using OpenRules.

Loosely Coupled Decision Models for Loan Origination

DMCommunity.org June-2017 Challenge is looking for the best decision models that implement a well-known Loan Origination problem described in in the Section 11 of the DMN specification. So, I decided to address this challenge using the core DMN constructs implemented in OpenRules. I will describe my solution in the form of dialog between a fictional READER who is assumed to be a business analyst (not a programmer) and the AUTHOR, who represents myself. It is similar to the dialog-sessions described in my recent book “DMN in Action with OpenRules“. While it may look long it doesn’t omit any implementation detail. Besides serving as a good solution for the Challenge, this document describes a good decision modeling practice for OpenRules customers.

Presenting at DecisionCAMP and BBC 2017

Soon we will participate in the major annual decision management events:

• DecisionCAMP in London on July 12-14
• BBC in Orlando on Nov 6-10

This year I am the chair of DecisionCAMP and will give a tutorial “Decision Modeling with DMN and OpenRules” at the co-located RuleML+RR on July 12 at 14:00-15:45.

At the BBC-2017 I will present “How Business Analysts Can Build Decision Models with DMN but Without Programming” on Nov 10 at 9:00-10:00. As usual, OpenRules will be a sponsor and an exhibitor – stop at our booth #T8 to see the latest version of OpenRules with “DMN in Action”.

Solving Flight Rebooking Challenge With and Without Programming Constructs

DMCommunity.org announced its Challenge “Rebooking Passengers from Cancelled Flights” in Oct-2016 and until now 4 different solutions have been submitted. It is a relatively complex use case for decision modeling. In this post I will describe different implementation approaches for this challenge and will discuss good and not so good DMN constructs used to support the underlying decisioning logic. I hope this post will initiate more discussions which may lead to the future DMN improvements by replacing the existing programming constructs to more business-friendly representations.