Design and implementation of a service-oriented business rules broker

Business rules define or constrain some business. Many different business rules engines exist to capture and manage the rules that comprise ones business. The lack of standards in the business rule area leads to different engine implementations and various rule representation formats. Furthermore, accessing rule-based knowledge in a uniform way from different heterogeneous applications in an enterprise computing environment poses many integration challenges. In this paper, we propose the design and implementation of a service-oriented approach on how to integrate different heterogeneous business rule engines by using our business rules broker architecture. Furthermore, we present a method to automatically expose the rule-based business knowledge as Web services by generating the Web service code at design-time.