Modeling and authoring business decisions
The intuitive and graphical user interface of Decision Designer brings together all the tools business experts need to model complex business decisions.
Business experts develop and validate decision services by using Decision Designer, a graphical user interface that provides powerful capabilities along with intuitive menus and wizards. In Decision Designer, business experts can use three main decision artifacts to develop their decision services: data models, decision models, and task models.
Data model
Business decisions apply to real-life data such as loans, cars, or customers. These real-life data are generally referred to as business concepts. In Automation Decision Services, you describe the data that governs your business activity in a data model. Creating a data model vocabulary allows you to populate decisions in your own language and puts you in control of the business logic.
The data model vocabulary can be easily created using text fields and drop-down menus to list the specific characteristics and attributes of your business objects. For example, you describe a car that has a model, a category, and a registration year. These attributes have values in the real world, and decisions depend on these values.
The data model vocabulary can be used across a decision service, in the different models it contains.
Decision model
- The information that is required to make the decision.
- How to make the final decision with that information – the decision logic.
Each decision model contains a decision diagram. Diagrams provide an abstract, high-level representation of how decisions and the data that is required to make these decisions are structured and related to each other. Creating diagrams is an iterative process where you decompose the decision that you want to make into smaller decisions. Decision decomposition helps to make the decision model simpler and easier to manage.
Diagrams are composed of a set of nodes that are used as building blocks to represent decisions in a graphical way:
The drag-and-drop feature available in the modeling environment helps you create and arrange nodes in a logical flow and draw dependencies from node to node.
- It evaluates the data available as input against a set of conditions that you define.
- It takes action to produce the output of the decision, depending on whether these conditions are satisfied.
Task model
Task models offer business experts a more advanced way to define decisions.
In a task model, the decision logic is defined at the root of the model, outside of a diagram. It is implemented as sets of business rules and decision tables that can be organized and grouped in folders. Each task model contains at least one ruleflow to control the execution of rules.
Whereas a decision diagram represent the dependencies between decisions and input data, a ruleflow represents a sequence. A ruleflow chain together tasks, and specifies how, when, and under what conditions they are run. It consists of several task nodes that are connected by logical links:
- Sets of business rules and decision tables to be executed at that point in the ruleflow, and in a specific order.
- Rule action statements to be executed.
- A reference to another ruleflow that is contained in the same task model.
- A reference to another model that is contained in the same decision service. It can be any type of model: decision model, predictive model, or task model.
The ruleflow editor palette helps you create and arrange ruleflow elements. The drag-and-drop feature available in the ruleflow editor allows you to easily draw transitions from element to element.