Combining Business Rules and Case Management for Decision Processes

Abstract

The main objective of this work is to develop a framework for an adequate combination of adaptive case management and business rules for decision making. Decisionmaking is the process of making choices among possible alternatives. Adaptive Case Management (ACM) is a recent approach for management knowledge work, which is supposed to be more flexible than the step-by-step guidance of business processes. Business rules can provide additional guidance in order to deal with complex decisions and to ensure consistent decision making. Decision making can naturally distinguish between different cases from routine work to special cases, which require more knowledge work. Case management provides relevant information for particular cases. Business rules can represent expert knowledge and govern decision making. In addition, they can guide a case worker by analysing a situation, providing guidelines for decision making and define constraints for decisions. The research project focuses on one hand, to separate the business rules from the business processes and the other hand to combine them with the case management for decision processes. For this aim, in the base of the decision model of Barbara von Halle and Larry Goldberg (2009) a new model has been developed. To develop the prototype presented in this thesis, the ADOxx platform was used to define the meta-model and to implement the case study.