An Agent-Based Approach for Sourcing Business Rules in Supply Chain Management

In recent years, business rule management has become an important component of enterprise information systems. Business rules represent guidelines about how an enterprise should conduct its business and provide better service for customers. Business rules are being widely deployed in supply chains to support real-time decision making. The research reported in this paper is aimed at designing a dynamically adaptable data-sourcing service for deploying business rules effectively in supply chain management. Such a data-sourcing service is important since execution of business rules requires data to be retrieved from various data sources spread across the enterprise, including the enterprise data warehouse. We propose a semantics-based approach to implement the data-sourcing service for business rules. Our approach captures semantics of business rules and provides an agent-enabled mechanism that dynamically maps business rules to the enterprise data model. A prototype system is implemented to illustrate our sourcing service and demonstrate the feasibility of our approach.