vincent
12-11-2008 06:00 PM
Jacob Feldman from 4C presented to OMG this week on the need for standardization in the Constraint Programming (CP) community. Although you can (and often do) represent business contraints in business rules and CEP systems (for example, you can argue that any rule condition is a constraint, or a value range in a decision table is a constraint), CP usually uses special techniques to solve complex business optimization problems that require juggling / relaxing these constraints to find an optimal or near-optimal “solution”. Examples might be aircraft load planning, bus schedules, and delivery vehicle routing. CP solutions to these problems also intersect with the CEP space, as plans are disrupted by events (such as an aircraft flight diversion due to turbulence, an event requiring more bus capacity, and a delivery vehicle breakdown). Sometimes such constraint systems are implemented using production rules, too.

With respect to rule model standards, OMG PRR has defined a baseline “rule behavior” definition, and OMG UML already has object constraints in OCL. It will be interesting to see if standardizing the metamodel for CP problems and engines will exploit or work with these, and how future CP systems will be used with CEP systems.



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