Decision services

A decision service contains one or more rule projects. Each rule project contains action rules and decision tables that you update directly. You can easily move among the projects to make changes, and deploy the decision service to a test or production environment.

The following diagram shows an example of a decision service, with a top-level project and its dependent projects:

Diagram shows a decision service and its dependent projects.

Lifecycle of a decision service

A decision service is published to Decision Center, and appears in the Business console library. Each decision service contains an initial release, which cannot be changed, and subsequent releases. Changes to a decision service are managed in regular branches, or governed releases and activities.

Each release is made up of a branch of each project that is contained in the decision service. For example, the following diagram shows that the Spring release of the Pricing decision service contains the Spring branch of each project that is contained in the decision service:

Diagram shows project branches between decision service releases.

When a release is fully developed and approved, it can be deployed to a production environment.

An administrator can delete a decision service from the Library > Decision services page in the Business console. This action permanently removes all the projects, branches, releases, and associated entries of the decision service in the database, and it no longer appears in Decision Center.