Agile Business Rule Development (ABRD) is a step-by-step process for developing business rule applications. An iterative methodology, ABRD employs agile software-development values. Rule development is organized as a series of cycles: discovery, analysis, authoring, validation, and deployment. Your team stays on schedule, delivering outstanding business rule applications.

View this free one-hour webinar and learn how to:

• Leverage ABRD as first open-source methodology for business rules
• Implement and deploy rules in an SOA or BPM context
• Engage in rule discovery and analysis

Jerome Boyer, author of ABRD, describes the methodology and demonstrates how it works.

• View the recorded version
• Read the slides from the presentation

Rich internet applications

“There is a particularly strong interest in thin client development, giving us ample opportunity to show off our Ajax components”, says Ed Kiraly from ILOG’s visualization product marketing team. “The whole Rich Internet Application (RIA) space is hot right now” explains the JavaOne veteran. Large enterprise players from Cisco to Tibco are showing a strong interest in smart thin clients and rich web interfaces. ILOG, as

ILOG’s Elixir offering built atop Adobe’s Flex framework is also interesting in this respect. Although how exactly do you hook up Java applications to this interface? Duane Nickull from Adobe answered this question for me, explaining how Adobe’s service oriented Lifecyle ES (Enterprise Suite), a J2EE server, forms the vital bridge between data and display.

Internalizing Google Map Mashups

On the subject of data and display, Ed drew my attention to a particularly interesting application of a Google Maps mashup that the JViews development team have produced. Blinking lights and bright green pipes over the map of San Francisco showed specific traffic movement across San Francisco’s highways. This in itself is nothing new and there are countless examples of these kinds of applications across the web. Where this gets interesting is when you realize the data overlayed on top of Google Maps is internal - something not possible with a generic implementation of Google’s API. Possible applications? How about an organization mapping out movements of its sales team for internal monitoring.

A global feel

So, where is most prospective interest coming from? According to ILOG sales rep Mark Steidel, booth visitors aren’t restricted to North America. There is interest from Canada and Europe and further afield Asia as well. Mark states JavaOne is by far the most important event for ILOG’s visualization product line.

The human face of Java

With the proliferation of enterprise-level development platforms over the last few years, Sun Microsystems really has its work cut out staying on top of the game.

‘Java + You’ is the JavaOne theme this year. This roughly translates as offering you (the consumer) the services you want, whether it be consumer-level or enterprise-level software. Sun is there, slap-bang in the middle. More human, nay more sexy, as Sun proved with the center-stage placement of that music god of the old-school Silicon Valley set: Neil Young. The approach has worked, if the front pages of the tech dailies are anything to go by.

Meanwhile, on the pavilion floor Project Wonderland takes pride of place among the sprawling Java booth space. This toolkit allows developers to build 3D virtual worlds in Second Life, linking up live applications like web browsers and Sun’s own OpenOffice documents.

Off-topic

ILOG Technical Account Manager (TAM) Dan Jeffrey recommended Albert-Laszlo Barabasi’s treatise on the behaviour of networks: Linked. Especially pertinent in these times when the conception, construction and management of online social networks is all the rage.

Operations researchers at CWI and Erasmus University Rotterdam constructed an improved, cyclical timetable allowing the schedule to be repeated every hour. Constructing such a timetable is a complex combinatorial optimization problem. One O.R. problem solver, called CADANS, solves the network timetabling problem, and a second, STATIONS, finds the detailed routes for the trains through the different stations. A third, ROSA, handles rolling stock circulation, using ILOG CPLEX and ILOG OPL Development Studio. Yet another, TURNI, schedules crews.

2007 showed an all-time record in number of passengers. Lines with the largest timetable improvements saw an increase in passenger demand of 10-15%. The percentage of trains arriving within 3 minutes of the scheduled time increased from 84.8 % in 2006 to 87.0 % in 2007, which is again an all-time high record. Surveys showed public opinion changed radically from negative to positive. The more efficient resource schedules and the increased number of passengers already resulted in an annual additional profit of 40 million Euros ($60 million). It is expected that this will increase to 70 million Euros ($105 million) in coming years. Finally, a further increase in railway transport on the current network is possible, which would reduce road congestion and pollution from greenhouse gases.

More information can be found in this success story on the ILOG web site.  We congratulate Netherlands Railways and their Operations Research collaborators (University of Padua, Erasmus University, CWI, and Safiro Software Solutions BV) on their great accomplishment.

• Maven, Eclipse and OSGi working together
• Implementing a debugger using the DSF framework
• Supporting Multiple Versions of Eclipse
• AMD CodeSleuth
• A Love Supreme?
• Services vs. Extensions
• Cloudsmith
• Eclipse 4.0
• What is new in the Eclipse 3.4 JDT
• Ganymede Packaging
• Babel
• Eclipse and VisualStudio in 2010

This recorded presentation covers what’s new in JRules 6.7:

• Features
• Benefits
• In-depth product demonstration

Find out why JRules 6.7 is the best solution for managing decision change, complexity, and compliance in your mission-critical business systems.

• View a recorded version of the presentation
• Slides from the presentation

More JRules information:

• JRules product pages
  
• Ready to test drive? Download the JRules Trial now

In the closing session of that event, the attendees were invited to debate the question of whether or not a physical conference was actually needed any more. After all, we now had the Web and email, so did we really need to travel hundreds or thousands of miles to a conference to meet each other in person?

After much debate, for and against the idea, the conclusion was that yes, face to face meetings like this were still an absolute necessity. The main argument put forward at the time? There is no such thing as a virtual beer…

So here we are, 14 years later. We’ve done a lot to leverage the web for this conference, both via our DIABLOG event blog and the DIALOG 08 website, and will continue to do so. Watch out for presentation slides and video footage of all track and keynote sessions that will be posted to the DIALOG website in the next few weeks.

Despite that, the value and enjoyment generated by this face-to-face meeting in Palm Springs is undeniable. Early feedback from our customers, prospects, partners, users, staff and executives has been overwhelmingly positive and plans are already underway to create an even bigger and better experience for DIALOG 09 (unless, of course, we decide to hold the conference in Second Life next year - where, incidentally, virtual beer has now been available for quite some time…) Watch this space!

This year’s DIALOG conference happened to coincide with the 80th Annual Academy Awards ceremony, so in true Hollywood style, I would like to take this opportunity to thank…

• Bruno for his Gallic charm and his faith in the whole DIALOG team,
• Pierre, for his good humor, his inspiration, … and his faith in my golf car driving abilities,
• Jessica, for her great blog input and for sharing her cookie with me,
• MC Joe, for keeping things moving,
• Aimee (aka Herbie), for her seemingly endless supply of USB keys and team spirit,
• Julie F, for her boundless energy and enthusiasm,
• Julie J, for her skills as a movie director (next stop Hollywood),
• Felicia, for her 9+ months of dedication,
• Rosemary, for her professional approach to customer service, and her calmness under pressure,
• Kevin, for just getting the job done,
• Cheryl, for her awesome xylophone skills - and for just being plain awesome,
  Check it out: here
• Nyrie, for her exec travel coordination talents, and for giving me a ride back from the airport,
• Monika, for her boundless devotion to the cause, her effortless charm and sophistication,
• Irv, for teaching me everything I’ve always wanted to know about mixed integer programming but had been too afraid to ask,
• Susan, for trusting in the blog initiative, even if I did get a bit ahead of the curve once or twice,
• Daryl, for taking time out from his vacation to drive to Palm Springs and blog from the trenches with me (I love you, man!)
• Martha, for her commitment to our customers and partners and her great input to the blog,
• James T, for lunch (even if I did have to bring my own),
• Jean-François for the free beer (even if it was just virtual),
• Allen, for the $2 bill,

Not forgetting everyone else in the back office, off-stage, on stage, or back at the office, who contributed above and beyond the call of duty. Also, thanks to the guys and girls from BrainSonic for their wall-to-wall video coverage of the event, and for the staff and management of the Westin Mission Hills Resort and Spa for accommodating our every need. It has been a great pleasure to work with such a talented and dedicated group of professionals on what has been a truly genuine team effort.

I join with the whole DIALOG team and everyone at ILOG in also thanking all the customers, prospects, partners, sponsors, journalists, and of course all our speakers, for being part of the conversation and making DIALOG 08 such a successful event.

As we look forward to next year’s event, we hope that you too will join the conversation and share your comments and feedback about DIALOG 08 here on the blog. Tell us what you enjoyed about this year’s event, what we could have done better, and what you would like to see more of at DIALOG 09.

The Dialog goes on…!

I suspect Irv organized a second vote because he wanted to avoid having to give the “Introduction to ILOG CP Optimizer” presentation which actually won the original electronic vote. Whether or not there was any vote-rigging involved, I don’t know, but I do know that the vote was quite spread, showing that there was interest in all the proposed topics. I thought of suggesting to Irv that he combine all seven proposed topics into a single talk, but who knows how that would have turned out!

Whether it’s because math was never really my strong point at school, or whether it’s because my brain was fried by 3.30pm on Day 3, I’m afraid Irv’s suggestions for improving MIP models was way over my head. I suppose I should have guessed that when he started with “It’s going to include a lot of math, and if you get lost in the math, so be it.” Oh boy.

If you’re interested in this topic, I think your best bet is to wait until the video is published online some time in the next few weeks! In the mean time, though, if you have any questions for Irv, feel free to post a comment here. Anyone got any Advil?

James was blogging the BRMS track throughout the conference and you can find more insights and commentary in his Live from DIALOG series over on his blog.

James used to work for Fair Isaac until about 6 months ago when he left to set up his own company, Smart (Enough) Systems LLC, which provides research, advisory services and implementation support for the enterprise decision management marketplace. James has been working with business rules and other decision management technologies for many years, and is both a well-known proponent of the approach and a passionate advocate of business rules.

Several customers at the table were looking to make rules more accessible to their business users. Many are still at the stage where developers manage the rules, but there is clear drive towards removing this bottleneck. This certainly fits with ILOG’s BRMS product strategy and these customers came to DIALOG to hear how other users were tackling this problem, and to discover best practices regarding rule governance, change management, and the rule development lifecycle.

James’ main piece of advice regarding rule governance was to avoid having a centralized rule governance team for all your enterprise rule projects. That would just create another bottleneck. Each project team should have its own governance processes built in. The role of the central governance team should be to simply ensure that projects are doing governance correctly.

He explained that when implementing a rule-based system for the first time, you shouldn’t expect to get everything right the first time. If changes are required once an application is in production, the business users should drive this change when they are ready for it, not IT.

He added that it is a far better approach to get good at managing change incrementally. You don’t have to roll out new systems to everyone simultaneously. Better to do so gradually, based on business need rather than IT schedules.

Other issues that had brought participants to DIALOG included enterprise architecture, best practices, performance, and migration to the new version of JRules.

Q: Many implementations don’t seem to be realizing the key benefits of the BR approach (business agility, turnaround, transparency, auditability, etc.) These systems are being implemented without active participation of the business stakeholders. Why is this?

A: There are several possible scenarios here. IT might be implementing a business rules approach as an internal project to optimize their own processes, and therefore the active participation of business users might not be appropriate. However, business rule vendors need to work harder to make things more accessible to business users.

R&D folk love to include cool and powerful features that add unnecessary complexity into their solutions, such as the ability to use the programming construct “++” for incremental additions. If you’re a programmer, that’s great, you save yourself some keystrokes and the system runs a millisecond faster. However, your average business user just won’t get it!

Part of any rule governance exercise is to determine who really cares about the project and to get them involved. Just because you use BAL [Business Action Language - ILOG’s “natural language-like” syntax for writing business rules] doesn’t mean it will be legible. You need to work together with business users on the object model and “verbalization” so that the vocabulary and language constructs you use to write your rules actually means something to the business users, and maps to their business user mindset.

If business users weren’t involved in the beginning, that’s going to be harder. It will also be harder to hand over the project to them later (IT have difficulty letting go and business users are not implicated/engaged in the project). It’s possible to refactor to correct early mistakes, but that might require a lot of additional work.

Q: What are the bottlenecks and pitfalls of moving rules towards an enterprise rule repository?

A: Managing all rules as a corporate asset might actually not be the best approach. You should only concentrate at the corporate level on those key rules that actually drive the business. When rules are reused throughout the organization, the impetus for change must come from the business side, not the IT side. For example, on Jan 1st there may be regulatory or price changes that requires the system to be updated. This is a business driver and may be completed unrelated to ongoing IT revision cycles.

Avoid implementing a project-driven, and technology driven repository structure. It should be business-driven. Rule governance is potentially the biggest bottleneck in any BRMS. Avoid having a centralized governance group. Make sure governance is built into individual projects. If you are sharing rules across different projects, it is better to do so at the ruleset level, not the individual rule level, as that makes things much easier to manage and leeps things modular.

The experience gained in refactoring database systems could be useful here. Several books are available on that topic.

You should definitely plan to refactor because the first implementation of any system rarely reflects the optimum solution. Don’t be afraid of that.

One approach when starting out is to set up your rules application to initially flag major decisions for manual validation, then gradually automate them. This was something that was discussed in the BRMS workshop on Sunday.

With a well-implemented modular business rule architecture comes agility. Agility is the ability to make changes to your systems every day, not be tied into the 3, 6, or 9 month IT project cycle.

If you didn’t make it to James’ lunch and learn session (or even if you did), feel free to post additional comments or questions for James here, or directly over on his Smart (Enough) Systems blog.

Kogenate is a leading treatment for hemophilia-A, a genetically transmitted condition that prevents blood clotting and affects 400,000+ people worldwide.

Prasad began with some startling figures: 1,600 employees in 15 manufacturing plants work continuously throughout the year to produce just 250 grams of active ingredient, supporting over one billion USD of annual sales of Kogenate.

250g. $1bn. Wow.

Biotech pharmaceutical companies function in massively regulated environments. Add to that the technical complexity of the supply chain and manufacturing process and you can understand why companies like Bayer can leave nothing to chance.

All batches follow the same process flow but may use alternative facilities at each stage: Expression, fermentation, purification, bulk, fill, freeze dry, and packaging. Only one batch can be processed in a facility at a time (to avoid cross-contamination). In certain stages of the manufacturing process, employees must work in multi-layer suits, with highly advanced air filtering and evacuation processes and for no longer than four-hour shifts at a time.

Demand side cosntraints: Large demand fluctuations. The tender process which is increasingly being used by customers, and public authorities creates uncertainty (you’re either in or you’re out of a market, depending on whether you win or lose the tender). Customer emergencies (accidents, cuts) can cause huge demand increases compared to normal prescription levels. Inventory risks: Cold chain needs to be permanently maintained (product must be kept refrigerated 2-8°C) - suppliers must always maintain mandated inventory levels.

Supply side constraints: Complexity in the process, regulatory approval, equipment, facility, and formulation. Process uncertainty: varying quality cycle times based on deviations. Varying reject rates. Biotech products are made using live proteins. The compounds are not produced synthetically and therefore the whole process is less predictable.

Supply chain Planning is a continuous process, with endless cycles of data updates, assumption updates, scenario revisions.

Bayer has close ties with UC Berkeley and is highly involved with the Biotech Forum.

Key objectives: Produce sufficient but not excessive material, as soon as possible, but not too soon, while meeting all regional regulatory requirements on product, process equipment, facilities and raw materials.

Key considerations: Traceability, No back orders. Stock outages is not an option (= loss of life … and law suits).

Bayer uses CPLEX for MIP formulation because it can handle their large problem size. It’s a reliable and proven platform. They needed a platform that developers were familiar with.

Solution times: 30,000 boolean variables, 500,000 float variables, 100,000 contraints. 90% optimum solution reached in about 12 hours on a 1.8Ghz quad core dual processor 64 bit machine with 16Gb RAM.

Challenges: Data quality from ERP, planning engine user interface bugs, interpretation of PE outputs, keeping PE assumptions up to date, WIFM issues from key users and end users

Benefits: One version of the truth. Data fidelity, scenario management, mid-term planning decision support (what-if scenarios). Planners are no longer afraid of calls from regulatory bodies. They can react much more quickly and easily.

The future: Ability to analyze historical batch data to better improve planning forecasts.