Types of business rules

M. zur Muehlen and M. Indulska. Modeling languages for business processes and business rules: A representational analysis. Information Systems, 35(4):379–390, Elsevier, 2010.

Different types of business rules can be distinguished:

• Integrity rules express constraints. These rules typically define the acceptable relationship between data ele- ments. For example, each project must have one and only one project manager.
• Derivation rules express conditions that result in conclusions. These rules define the validity of facts and can be used to infer new facts based on known facts. For example, platinum customers receive a 5% discount. John Doe is a platinum customer. As a conclusion, John Doe receives a 5% discount.
• Reaction rules (also known as Event-Condition- Action (ECA) rules, alternative-action rules, or post- conditions) specify a trigger that activates the evaluation of the rule, a condition that is evaluated, and a subsequent activity that will be carried out if the specified condition is met; for example, the evaluation of a reaction rule is triggered as soon as a new invoice is received. If the invoice amount is more than $1000 then a supervisor review is initiated.
• Production rules (also known as condition, action rules) are similar to reaction rules, but do not specify a particular circumstance in which the evalua- tion takes place; For example, if there are no defects in the last 10 widgets, the entire batch is quality approved.
• Transformation rules restrict the state changes of objects; for example, an employee’s age can change from 30 to 31, but not from 31 to 30.

G. Wagner, Rule modeling and markup, in: N. Eisinger, J. Maluszynski (Eds.), Reasoning Web, 3564 ed., vol. 3564, Springer, Berlin, Msida, Malta, 2005, pp. 251–274.