Business Rules Engine (BRE): A business’ rule, in a wide sense, can be defined as “a statement that defines or constrains some aspect of the business. It is intended to assert business structure or to control or influence the behavior of the business” (Morgan, 2002). These rules can come from legal regulations, company’s policies and other sources. From this, a BRE can be understood as a software containing the definitions of some rules, not necessarily all of them, that executes them in a production environment (Chisholm, 2004).
Ronald Ross classified BRE’s in two types: those related with databases and thus made to interpret information and from that setting the regulations, and the ones that can make inferences, this is, those that can be asked questions in order to know what action must be performed in a given situation (Ross, 2003). The last ones have a deep relation with the development of Artificial Intelligence, but they are not as used as the BRE that just interpret data in order to stablish basic parameters for the operation.
The needs of each company related to a BRE may vary depending on the complexity of each enterprise’s rules. Thus, while these can bring a significative cost reduction and a
process improvement, it is necessary to make an insightful study of its possibilities and the requirements of each company (Chisholm, 2004).