Business Rule Management System

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A BRMS or Business Rule Management System is a software system used to manage and support the business rules of an organisation or enterprise.

The main class of BRMSs maintains rules that are executed in a production rule system but also maintained in a repository with a user interface suitable for business users to create, read, update and delete them.

The main benefits of a BRMS are:

reduced or removed reliance on IT departments for changes in live systems
increased control over implemented business logic, for compliance and better business management

Most BRMS vendors have evolved from rule engine vendors, providing business-usable software development lifecycle solutions based on declarative definitions of business rules executed in their own rule engine. However, some vendors have come from a different approach (for example mapping decision trees or graphs to executable code). Rules in the repository are generally mapped to decision services that are naturally fully compliance with the latest SOA, Web Services, etc software architecture trends.

[edit] Related software approaches

In a BRMS, a business representation of rules is mapped to a software system for execution. A BRMS is therefore related to model-driven engineering such as in the Object Management Group Model Driven Architecture. It is no coincidence that many of the related standards are under the OMG banner.

[edit] Associated standards

There is no current implementation standard for business rules defined within a BRMS. Related standards under development are:

OMG BMM Business Motivation Model (model of how strategy, process, rules etc fit together for business modeling)
OMG SBVR Semantics of Business Vocabulary and Rules (targets business constraints as opposed to automating business behavior)
OMG PRR Production Rule Representation (representing rules for Production Rule systems that make up most BRMS' execution targets)
W3C RIF Rule Interchange Format (family of related rule languages for rule interchange)

Many standards (such as domain-specific languages) define their own representation of rules, requiring translations to generic rule engines or their own custom engines. Other domains also define rules, such as: