Book Image

Drools JBoss Rules 5.X Developer's Guide

By : Michal Bali
Book Image

Drools JBoss Rules 5.X Developer's Guide

By: Michal Bali

Overview of this book

<p>Writing business rules has always been a challenging task. Business rules tend to change often leading to a maintenance nightmare. This book shows you various ways to code your business rules using Drools, the open source Business Rules Management System.<br /><br />Drools JBoss Rules 5.X Developer's Guide shows various features of the Drools platform by walking the reader through several real-world examples. Each chapter elaborates on different aspects of the Drools platform. The reader will also learn about the inner workings of Drools and its implementation of the Rete algorithm.<br /><br />The book starts with explaining rule basics, then builds on this information by going through various areas like human readable rules, rules for validation, and stateful rules, using examples from the banking domain. A loan approval process example shows the use of the jBPM module. Parts of a banking fraud detection system are implemented with the Drools Fusion module which is the complex event processing part of Drools. Finally, more technical details are shown detailing the inner workings of Drools, the implementation of the ReteOO algorithm, indexing, node sharing, and partitioning.</p>
Table of Contents (22 chapters)
Drools JBoss Rules 5.X Developer's Guide
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Setting Up the Development Environment
Creating Custom Operators
Dependencies of Sample Application
Index

Fraud detection


It will be easier to explain these concepts using an example of a fraud detection system. Fraud in banking systems is becoming a major concern. The amount of online transactions are increasing every day. An automatic system for fraud detection is needed. The system should analyze various events happening in a bank, and based on a set of rules, raise an appropriate alarm.

This problem cannot be solved by the standard Drools rule engine. The volume of events is huge and they happen asynchronously. If we simply insert them into the knowledge session, we would soon run out of memory. While the Rete algorithm behind Drools doesn't have any theoretical limitation on the number of objects in a session, we could use the processing power more wisely. Drools Fusion is the right candidate for this kind of task.

Problem description

Let's consider the following set of business requirements for the fraud detection system:

  • If a notification is received from a customer about a stolen card, block...