ABSTRACT
This chapter is intended for the benefit of financial and business analysts who may be called upon to participate in the specification and design of new business software systems or the redesign of legacy software systems. The intent is to familiarize business analysts with the new emerging software development methodologies of business rules and knowledge management, with the goal of helping them become better stewards of the business systems knowledge inherent in today's software applications. Production rule systems provide a better alternative for implementing business rules than embedding them in application logic or implementing them as database triggers. The architecture of production rule systems is comprised of five primary components: data, rules, inference engine, knowledge representation language, and knowledge component objects. Historically, the application of production rule systems to a problem solution was considered a high-risk, high-return endeavor.
