Richard Brenton Jr gave an excellent presentation on PJM’s use of TIBCO BusinessEvents for operational visibility – the control rules for the electricity supply grid, executing against operational events. The main point made here was that for true business control of rules, you need to not only business rules in the vocabulary of the business, but represented in the form the business requires (i.e. one shape of rules management does not fit all).
PJM have built a custom operations dashboard that includes the ability to control and update the supply control rules. Their rules management system or BRMS? MS Sharepoint! Sharepoint provides the workflow, version control, etc, for the “rule objects” that in turn are sent to the running rule engine as rule parameters. This exploits the power of the underlying Rete rules engine with the programmed rules being business rule templates. So Sharepoint is the rule repository, and new rules are fed to the system as events (with an update latency of 2ms). So a Sharepoint form provides the BRMS user interface…
Richard gave a good example of the power of the rule-driven, event-based approach. This past Summer’s East Coast US Earthquake (and subsequent shut-down of a major nuclear power plant) was followed by Hurricane Irene. PJM operators swiftly updated their control rules to suit. Given not many businesses in the E USA would have predefined rules for an earthquake followed by a hurricane, the ability to adapt “on the fly” using business rule technology proved pretty useful.
