- #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
Dr. Gopal Gupta and Abhilash Tiwari are talking about constraint programming in a spreadsheet interface. He calls constraints rules.
The motivation behind this is that non-experts should be able to program rules and to leverage existing technologies. The scope of the problems is constraints satisfaction problems (CSP).
The type of problem to resolve are usually NP-complete in complexity so they are very hard to solve. As an example, resource allocation is a typical problem they need to resolve.
Spreadsheets (rows and columns of data) allow some programming with macros or formulas. The calculations are applied by replications (a formula in a cell is copied to other cells). In current spreadsheets you can only have arithmetic expressions, so there is a need to extend the functionality to support constraints.
The tool (PlanEx) they developed uses .Net technology as an add-in to Excel. They offer formulas such as Distinct, Frequency, Present_Once, and If-then. You can then ask for the product to solve the problem and get a solution. If you don’t like the solution and there are multiple solutions, you can ask for another solution.
He gave some examples of problems such as preparing the schedule for university courses (courses offered by teachers in classrooms and possibly at specific times, etc.) or simply employee scheduling in a shift based company.
They then gave us a short demo of the tool to solve a sudoku puzzle as well as for the course scheduling problem.
Tags: Business Rules, Conferences, ORF09