- #ORF09 An introduction to the RETE algorithm
- #ORF09 Playing With the Rules Presentation
- #ORF09 Rule Patterns and Features Presentation
- #ORF09 Early Alert System Presentation
- #ORF09 Engineer’s perspective on Rule Technology Keynote
- #ORF09 Enterprise Architecture Presentation
- #ORF09 Enterprise Architecture Presentation Part II
- #ORF09 Model Driven Approach for BRMS Presentation
- #ORF09 Production Rule Systems
- #ORF09 Graph Based Knowledge Bases and Rules Presentation
- #ORF09 Truth versus Useful Lies Presentation
- #ORF09 Automated Verification of rules Presentation
- #ORF09 Agile Business Rule Development Presentation
- #ORF09 Rule Classification First Presentation
- #ORF09 Rule Violation and Over-Constrained Problems Presentation
- #ORF09 Generating Rules from UML presentation
- #ORF09 What’s Different about Rules in CEP Presentation
- #ORF09 Measuring your Rules’ KPI Presentation
- #ORF09 Designing a System of Rule Based Agents Presentation
- #ORF09 Extending General Purpose Engines Presentation
- #ORF09 Programming Rules using a spreadsheet interface
- #ORF09 Practical and Modern RBE Presentation
- #ORF09 Temporal Reasoning Presentation
- #ORF09 Business Rules in the Cloud Presentation
- #ORF09 October Rules Fest Think Tank
- #ORF09 October Rules Fest Think Tank – Part II
- #ORF09 CLIPS implementation of RETE Presentation
- #ORF09 Complex Event Processing Models Presentation
- #ORF09 Distributed Programming with Agents Presentation
- #ORF09 making Parallelism Available to Rule Developers Presentation
Luke Voss is back presenting on rule based agents.
“We need more software that does work”
This is what Luke is really working on these days. It was inspired by his work at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in the Advanced Concepts Design Team (Team X).
Team X has design sessions (3 x 3 hours sessions over a week) and uses a process where they:
- Identify Science goals
- Identify Mission Constraints
- Explore a baseline design
- Time-permitting, explore alternatives
- Draft a final report
The models an tools that they use are well known because space missions have the same basic structure. One of the things they use is a set of network spreadsheets that share information. The higher level spreadsheet gathers the information from sub-spreadsheets to have a more complete view. Not very high tech, but it apparently works for their purpose.
This way of working, gave an large improvement over traditional design sessions. Is there a way to get more improvements (time, costs, quality, quantity)? Some of the ideas being discussed to get this are:
- Compositional Models
- Altered team structures (simplified teams with simpler systems kind of kept static)
- Executable models
- Rule-based system
It was obvious to Luke that the rule based approach had a lot of potential. He is thinking about:
- Agent-based
- Networked
- Modeled after the existing team
- Two modes
- Solution path (to get a baseline design)
- Tradespace exploration (to get a list of designs)
The Agents can be broken down into different types covering a spectrum from “Fuzzy” to “Well-defined”:
- Coordination Agent
- Domain Expert Agent
- Algorithmic Agent
- Human Agent
Why an Agent based approach as opposed to a single rulebase? Each agent will have relatively well defined boundaries which makes it easier to test an agent and to understand it. But it makes troubleshooting of the interactions more complicated. The agents enforce a separation of concerns. Crossing the boundaries of an agent is more costly, but the trade-off is worth it. Maintenance of the rules is easier because of the limited scope of the rules. The performance is not as important a concern since computer time is cheap when compared to human time.
This is about automating boring engineering.
Very interesting talk with a practical outcome and a lot of potential to help the engineering field.