Chapter 2. Rules Engines and Red Hat Decision Manager

A rules engine is a software element that makes decisions based on business logic built using declarative format. Rules engines can be very basic (providing support for simple rules) or very complicated (based on sophisticated algorithms).

Red Hat Decision Manager provides you with a flexible set of decision capabilities, including a rules engine based on the PHREAK algorithm (an evolution of the well known Rete algorithm), a DMN Compliance Level 3 runtime, support for PMML, and a Complex Event Processing (CEP) engine.

The PHREAK reasoning algorithm runtime can easily scale to hundreds of thousands of rules in a single rules execution environment, while providing low-latency and high-performance business rules execution.

Because it is a lightweight engine, you can use Red Hat Decision Manager as a decision service and runtime in various architectures and deployment topologies, including, embedded systems and microservices architectures. You can combine the decision engine with multiple application frameworks and runtimes.

Red Hat Decision Manager is built on open standards (DMN, XML, JSON, JAX-RS) and de-facto standards (Git, Maven, Eclipse, IntelliJ). It has the following capabilities:

These capabilities facilitate improved business agility, consistent and efficient decision execution, shorter development cycles, and faster time to market.