A novel collaborative approach for business rules consistency management

Abstract

This paper presents an approach based on ontology and agents. The major objective is to automatically manage the consistency of business rules introduced by the experts during the capitalization of business rules process as part of a collaborative system dedicated to experts. The Evaluator agent is at the heart of our functional architecture, its role is to detect the problems that may arise in the consistency management module and provide a solution to these problems in order to validate the accuracy of business rules. It uses the knowledge represented in the domain ontology. We exploit the possibilities of TERMINAE method to represent the company’s business model and manage the consistency of the rules that are introduced by business experts. The suggested approach treats here the cases of contradiction, redundancy, invalid rules, the domain violation and the rules never applicable. We conducted some experiments to test the feasibility of our approach.