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Decision Driven Business Processes Using Red Hat BPM Suite 6.4

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Business Processes as defined by the BPMN 2.0 specifications are usually structured and rigid.  This is great for well-defined end-state business logic.  In another words things don't change much.  In the real world business requirements change often and many times drastically.  Making such changes in rigid business processes can be both risky and time consuming. The Red Hat BPM Suite 6.x allows for top-level ad-hoc processes that can be driven by signals.  This gives us a flexibility rigid process do not.  In this article I will outline a pattern using ad-hoc processes that can be driven by business decisions encoded in business rules.  This flexibility allows for quick changes without modifying the business processes. Example Business Case To show the decision driven business process pattern we will use a simple business case of ordering supplies through the company procurement department.  We have four different actors: the employee (requester) who makes the supplies reques

Example of DMN (Decision Model & Notation) execution in jBPM 7

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jBPM 7 has support for OMG's DMN specification 1.1 ( http://www.omg.org/spec/DMN/1.1/ ) conformance level 3.  What this means is jBPM 7 not only supports decision requirements, decision logic, and decision tables (conformance level 1) but also supports the full FEEL (Friendly Enough Expression Language) specification.  Unfortunately jBPM 7 currently doesn't include an authoring tool to create DRDs (Decision Requirements Diagram).  For this I am using Trisotech's DMN authoring tool ( http://www.trisotech.com/dmnquickstart ). I'm using a simple car insurance quote problem to demonstrate the capabilities of DMN.  I'm also integrating DMN to BPMN using jBPM 7.5 running on Wildfly 10.1. Decision Requirements Diagram To keep the example simple I'm using three inputs into the decision making process.  A Car that has attributes type, age, and price.  A Driver that has age, number of tickets, and number of accidents.  And a base quote amount. The above