Notes from DecisionCAMP-2019

DecisionCAMP-2019 in beautiful Bolzano on Sep. 17-19 will go down in history as one of the most successful DecisionCAMPs. As usual, it was packed with interesting presentations and even more interesting formal and informal discussions. I’ve written my notes from this memorable event – read them here.

Stateful Decisioning and State Machines

Nowadays it’s not enough for decision-making applications to simply execute a complex rules-based transaction, forget about it, and wait for the next one. These applications frequently have to maintain states of the business objects they manage and and based on their states invoke different decision services. Orchestration of the decision services becomes a serious issue but different implementation techniques frequently utilize State machines. In this post we will use the DMCommunity Aug-2019 Challenge to demonstrate how it can be done.

Notes from DecisionCAMP-2018

This year DecisionCAMP was held in Luxembourg Sep 17-19 as a part of the Logic for AI Summit. It became an important event that attracted experts and practitioners in the business decision management from 14 countries. We had 54 official registrations and sometimes even more people were present in the auditorium. The representatives from almost all major BR&DM vendors and many well-known experts attended the event. As the chair of the event, I wrote the Notes from DecisionCAMP-2018 published at the DMCommunity.org blog.

OpenRules customer selected as worldwide Awards Finalist

A major California bank, facing looming regulatory deadlines, needed to develop a highly dynamic web application to support the bank’s complex customer account management processes. The integrated use of OpenRules’ s rule and rendering engines became the foundation for the successful and quick implementation. OpenRules nominated this real-world application to the first annual Business Rules Excellence Awards (BREA).  This success story was selected as a worldwide Finalist in the 2018 Business Rules Excellence Awards. This is a significant achievement for the Bank and OpenRules. The announcement of winning entries will take place on October 16.

OpenRules Presentations at DecisionCAMP and LuxLogAI-2018

OpenRules was well presented at the major technical business decision management event DecisionCAMP-2018. Here are the presentations directly related to OpenRules:

• Goal-Oriented Business Decision Modeling, Jacob Feldman (OpenRules)
• Automatic judgment of decision authority using OpenRules, Yoshihito Nakayama (Intra-Mart)
• Decision Modeling at AXA CH, Wilfried Kurth (AXA CH)

I also published a paper “Building and Analyzing Goal-Oriented Decision Models” at the Proceedings of the RuleML+RR 2018 Challenge – it explains our goal-oriented approach to decision modeling using a Credit Card Application decision model. In my closing notes I tried to demonstrate how a smarter decision engine can simplify decision modeling using concrete examples from DMCommunity.org challenges. After considering different decision modeling approaches, we will add these capabilities to standard OpenRules features.

Decision Automation and Explanations

Prof. Gene Freuder wrote a position paper “Complete Explanations” for The Second Workshop on Progress Towards the Holy Grail that will be held on Aug 27, 2018 during CP 2018 in Lille, France. Gene writes: “As AI becomes more ubiquitous there is a renewed interest in computers being able to provide explanations, and the European GPDR provides special impetus.” Geen’s paper concentrates on constraint satisfaction problems (CSPs), but, as I’d shown in my 2016 paper, we may consider a decision model as a CSP, and everything Gene is talking about directly applies to business decision modeling.

OpenRules will Present and Exhibit at BBC-2018 in November

This year OpenRules, Inc. again will be a sponsor, exhibitor, and a presenter at BBC-2018  that will be held on Nov. 6-9, 2018, JW MARRIOTT SAN ANTONIO HILL COUNTRY RESORT & SPA, SAN ANTONIO, TX. The presentation Replacing Legacy Bank Account Management System Using Business Rules will be presented on Nov. 8 together with our customer, one of the largest CA banks.

Happy 15th Birthday, OpenRules!

Today is exactly 15 years since OpenRules, Inc. was incorporated on Feb. 24, 2003. It’s a quite serious milestone, so I decided to write a few words for this occasion. A year ago, I described a brief history of our company and key factors that made it successful. 2018 was an extremely successful year for OpenRules as well: we improved the product and many major corporations became our new customers. But in this post I want to look to the future and to share some of our upcoming and long term plans.

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”.

BBC 2016

This year OpenRules will again be an exhibitor and a presenter at the major Business Rules and Decisions Forum 2016 at BBC conference on Oct 31- Nov 4, 2016, Las Vegas, NV. We are sponsoring this major BR&DM event for 13 years in a row.  Our event theme will be “DMN in Action” as we will show our latest advances supporting the DMN standard. We will also present our newly developed “Why-Analyzer for Decision Modeling“. If you decide to attend BBC-2016 you still may receive a 20% discount when you register using our discount code “OPENRLV1620”. Stop by at our booth T5.

OpenRules Wins 10th International Rule Challenge Award

Congratulations to OpenRules team: I’ve just learned that our “What-If Analyzer for DMN-based Decision Models” won the 10th International Rule Challenge Award. Here is the certificate:

DecisionCAMP 2016

Last year the organizers of the DecisionCAMP (including myself) were not able to organize this very popular event that started in 2008 (see the history below). So, this year I put a lot of time and efforts to revive the Decision CAMP and have become its Chair and the main driving force behind the event. Thanks to support of our colleagues from RuleML and DMCommunity.org, we will  hold DecisionCAMP-2016 on July 7-8, 2016 at Stony Brook University, New York.

OpenRules at BBC 2016

This year OpenRules will again be an exhibitor at the Business Rules and Decisions Forum 2016 at BBC conference on Oct 31- Nov 4, 2016, Las Vegas, NV. We are sponsoring this major BR&DM event for 13 years in a row. I’ve just received a confirmation that my presentation“Why” and “What-If” Buttons for Business Decision Management” has been accepted. Here is an abstract:

After bpmNEXT-2016

Today was the last day of bpmNext-2016 – a great event concentrated around 3 closely related technologies and their standards: BPMN, CMMN, and DMN. You may look at the program to see how many well-known experts and vendors attended the conference. The quality of presentations and informal discussions during and after the sessions was something that we all will remember after this event.

RuleML and DecisionCAMP 2016

This year OpenRules will sponsor the 10th International Web Rule Symposium RuleML that will take place at the Stony Brook University, New York on July 6-9, 2016. RuleML is well-known for building bridges between academia and industry in the field of business rules. Our CTO Dr. Jacob Feldman is a publicity chair of the conference. He is also the organizer of DecisionCAMP-2016 that will be held on July 7-8 at RuleML.  This year DecisionCAMP will focus on the new OMG standard “Decision Model and Notation (DMN)” and an emerging best practice.  If you attend, you will have a chance to meet face-to-face with many well-known decision management gurus, vendors, and practitioners.

bpmNEXT 2016

This year OpenRules will participate in the bpmNEXT 2016 that will take place at Santa Barbara, CA on April 19-21, 2016. This is a very selective conference that does not allow marketing and forces the presenters to do only live demonstrations of specific achievements that have a chance to shape the next generation of Business Process Management software – including intelligent operations, the Internet of Things, case management, business decision management, and goal-directed processes. I will present “Dynamic Decision Models: Activation/Deactivation of Business Rules in Real ­Time” on Apr. 21 at 14:00.

OpenRules at BBC-2015

Since its incorporation in 2003, every year OpenRules, Inc. attends, sponsors, and presents at the Business Rules Forums. This year OpenRules  will again be a sponsor and a presenter at this largest Business Rules and Decision Management event now called BBC-2015 that will be held in Las Vegas on November 2-6, 2015.

Presentation at BBC-2015: Good Old UServ Product Derby in the Brave New World of Decision Management

James Taylor and I are giving a session at this year’s Building Business Capability conference on “Good Old UServ Product Derby in the Brave New World of Decision Management“at 4:50pm on the Wednesday of the show.

Resolving Conflicts among Business Rules

Contradictory business rules occur in normal business situations, and maintaining rules with exceptions is a very typical example of rule conflicts. Is it possible to automatically resolve such conflicts?

Learning Business Rules from Data at RuleML-2014

This year RuleML-2014 will be held in Prague on Aug 18-20. For the first time it will include a special track called “Learning Business Rules from Data”.  As a member of the organizing committee, I posted the proper announcement here. It promises to become a very interesting event when the decision management practitioners meet their academic partners.

2013 => 2014

2013 was a year when OpenRules became 10 years old. These days it is a mature BR&D (Business Rules and Decision) Management product used by thousands of customers worldwide.  The following statistic from http://openrules.com demonstrates the constantly growing popularity of our product:

OpenRules at Decision CAMP 2013

OpenRules is one of the initiators and sponsors of the DecisionCAMP-2013, the
first event for Decision Management practitioners, which will be held in San Jose, CA on Nov 4-6. This event attracted many well-known experts in the business rules and decisions management area – see the agenda. We expect ~250 attendees. OpenRules will participate in the following mini-events:

OpenRules in Japan

Dr. Feldman and Mr. Nakayama, CEO at Intra-Mart

I’ve just returned from my first ever trip to Japan. I am coming back home to the US with very bright impressions of the Japanese culture and people. I was especially impressed by the deep respect and high professionalism with which people in Japan perform their jobs independently of how small or important those jobs are. I deeply appreciate the friendliness and readiness to help from people on the streets of Tokyo and Kyoto that I have not seen for a while.

This visit was organized by our Japanese partner NTT Data Intra-Mart.

Upcoming Events

This fall there will be several international events related to Decision Management:

Webinar: Creating and Managing Executable Decision Models with DecisionsFirst Modeler and OpenRules

Watch Recorded Webinar

We are pleased to announce a joint free webinar organized by Decision Management Solutions and OpenRules.

Combining Constraint Solving with Business Rules and Machine Learning – CoCoMiLe 2013

The integration of different decision making techniques finally is finding its home under the roof of the Decision Management movement. I am glad that an integrated Constraint Programming (CP), Business Rules (BR), and Machine Learning (ML) approach is gaining in popularity as well. An interesting workshop “CoCoMiLe 2013 –

2012 in review

Happy 2013 to all OpenRules customers, colleagues, and friends! The WordPress.com prepared a 2012 annual report for this blog.

Fall 2012 – Time for Conferences

As usual, every fall OpenRules participates in major international conferences devoted to intelligent decision making. Here is a list of this year conferences from our website:

Fall-2011 Business Rules Conferences

In Oct-Nov 2011 OpenRules will participate in the following major Business Rules events:

OpenRules at Business Analyst World in PA on April 4-7, 2011

Now, when OpenRules-6 really allows business analysts to create and execute decision models without help from IT, we started to concentrate more on business analyst events.

OMG Decision Model Notation (DMN)

On March 23, 2011 I attended the Object Management Group‘s Decision Modeling Notation (DMN) day in Arlington, VA.  There were very interesting presentations from vendors and practitioners devoted to decision modeling in general and decision tables in particular – see the detailed report at the James Taylor’s blog. You may find more information about the DMN in this article.

RulesFest-2010

This year Rules Fest will be held on October 11-14, 2010 in San Jose, CA. This event brings together technical experts and practitioners in decision support technologies.