Creating decisions

Automate complex business decisions with rules and decision tables to reduce manual effort, provide consistent outcomes, and apply compliance with business policies.

Creating a decision

To create a decision:

  1. From the menu Menu, select Skill studio.

  2. Click Create and select Project.

  3. From the New project screen, name your project, describe your project, and click Create.

  4. Choose the Decision skill type. Then, select the type of model that best fit your needs:

    • Decision model

      Decision models offer a straightforward and low-code approach to expressing and refining operational decisions through a structured, visual representation of a decision.

      Each decision model contains a decision diagram. Diagrams provide an abstract, high-level representation of how decisions and the data that is required to do these decisions are structured and related to each other. Creating diagrams is an iterative process where you break the decision that you want to make into smaller decisions.

    • Ruleflow model

      Ruleflow models offer a more advanced way to define decisions.

      In a ruleflow 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 ruleflow model contains at least one ruleflow to control the execution of rules.

      Whereas a decision diagram represents the dependencies between decisions and input data, a ruleflow represents a sequence. A ruleflow chains the tasks, and specifies how, when, and under what conditions they run.

    • Prediction model

      Prediction models are based on the same principles as decision models and use diagrams to call machine learning models and compute predictions. Computed predictions can then be used in decision models and ruleflow models to make more informed decisions. The complementarity of rule-based decision modeling and machine learning gets the best of both worlds: predictive insights from historical data and prescriptive business decisions based on company policies.

      Prediction models can be configured to either start a machine learning model that is hosted outside of watsonx Orchestrate or run machine learning models locally.

  5. Name and describe your model.

  6. Click Create.

The Diagram tab opens with the selected model.

Skills can be private or public. You can exclude a skill from being visible in the catalog after the project is published by marking it private in your list of skills. You can click the icon Private skill icon or Public skill icon next to the skill name in your list to make the skill private or public.

The following video has no narration and exemplifies the procedure.

Deleting a decision

To delete a decision, click the Delete icon Delete icon in the skill toolbar.

Important:
  • When you delete a decision, the activities, skills, and assistants that use the decision might no longer work.
  • After deletion, make sure to complete the following actions:
    • Manually replace or remove the decision from the activities, skills, and assistants that use it.
    • If the decision was previously shared, share your changes after the deletion so that the decision deletion is shared.
    • If the decision was published to the skill catalog, delete it from the skill catalog. To delete it from the skill catalog, go to Skill studio and delete the skill.

Parent topic:

→ Building projects