Contextualized Business Rule Repositories: Business Rule Organization Through Contexts

Today's businesses face an increasing number, complexity, and variability of business rules. Business rules, including the business vocabulary they rely on, mostly apply in specific situations or contexts only, that is, they have a scope limiting their validity. Hence, a business rule organization enabling effective and efficient maintenance, search, and execution of business rules along their contexts is vital to businesses. Many research fields employ contexts to manage, organize, and reason about knowledge. A context comprises context knowledge, defining a scope, and contextualized knowledge, applying within the scope. Organizing knowledge by contexts facilitates faster knowledge entering and reasoning, reduced knowledge redundancy by organizing contexts in hierarchies, and easier browsing. However, current business rule management systems do not utilize contexts to organize business rules. The thesis proposes Contextualized Business Rule Repositories (CBRs), organizing business rules along their context of application (e.g. business rules applying in context "briefing for pilots" with additional business rules applying in sub-contexts "briefing for pilots flying fixed-wing aircrafts" and "briefing for pilots flying rotational-wing aircrafts"). To enable effective and efficient business rule maintenance in CBRs, the thesis presents modification operations for CBR models as well as CBR roles enabling effective separation of tasks and responsibilities. It describes how modification operations and CBR roles support business rule management in CBRs. Further, the thesis introduces a generic approach to rule set inheritance that fosters reuse and simplifies adaptation of rule sets. The applicability of CBRs and their benefits are demonstrated by a real-world use case from aeronautics, the classification of aeronautical messages such as NOTAMS (Notices to Airmen) in pilot briefings.