Towards a Decentralized Cooperative BRMS for Service Collaborative Enterprise

BRMS has played an important role in the development of business applications with its capability of separating business logic from hardcode of programming languages as business rules in a manageable and executable manner to improve agility of these applications. In Service Collaborative Enterprise (SCE), BRMS needs to be utilized in a cooperative way to facilitate the participants defining and enacting their inter-organization business rules for the applications in a truly decentralized manner. Motivated by these natures, this paper presents a Decentralized Cooperative BRMS (DC-BRMS) to meet the requirement from the SCE for their inter-organization business rules management. The design of DC-BRMS exploits Peer-to-Peer (P2P) technology as infrastructure to provide genuinely decentralized business rules management support, which removes the centralized rule repository storage and governing control from the system. Consequently, both repository storage and cooperative control are distributed so that the cooperative functions are fulfilled through the direct communication among the relevant peers. A set of collaborative principles are also represented at a high level and then implemented within cooperative service to support decentralized cooperation. This paper presents the authors' innovative decentralized cooperative BRMS design, and also covers the corresponding cooperative mechanisms and the implementation of a prototype to demonstrate of this design and functions.