Corticon Speeds Business Rules Engine

An upgrade to Corticon Technologies Inc.s business rules engine software will run about 10 times faster than the current version.

That feature of Decision Management Platform Version 2.8 will help organizations such as the state of Washingtons Department of Health Services process vast amounts of data for business process automation, Corticon officials said.

Bonnie Moonchild, Social Service Payment System project manager with the agency, expects the Decision Management Platform update to reduce by 30 to 50 percent the cycle time for deciding when to withhold union dues from the states more than 40,000 health care providers.

"We have a 20-plus-year-old COBOL system, and one of the ways were using Corticon is that we are going to pull all the rules in the old system—or the ones that we still want—into Corticon and then use the generating part [of the rules engine] to help us enforce, or run those rules from within an application," said Moonchild, in Olympia. "Using the product helps inform our [deduction process] design so that it will be generic enough to do any kind of deduction, and when we add other deductions, it wont be as big a project to make changes in the process."

Decision Management Platform enables companies to create and manage business rules in a spreadsheetlike environment. Once rules are built, users are able to check them prior to implementation to ensure they are complete and nonconflicting.

Using a Java-based interface, users can develop rule language operators that appear as if they were part of the standard product, Corticon officials said. At the same time, Corticon vocabularies, rule sheets and test sheets can be exported in XML, stylized by Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformations and presented in an HTML browser as documentation, said company officials, in San Mateo, Calif.

The software also helps business process management software developers such as HandySoft Corp., Intalio Inc. and Action Technologies Inc. simplify the design of complex decision-making process steps. It does this by highlighting logical inconsistencies and gaps during the design phase of a business process management project, Corticon officials said.