A scalable rule engine architecture for service execution frameworks

Abstract

Rule engines form an essential component of most service execution frameworks in a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) ecosystem. The efficiency of a service execution framework critically depends on the performance of the rule engine it uses to manage it's operations. Most common rule engines suffer from the fundamental performance issues of the Rete algorithm that they internally use for faster matching of rules against incoming facts. In this paper, we present the design of a scalable architecture of a service rule engine, where a rule clustering and hashing based mechanism is employed for lazy loading of relevant service rules and a prediction based technique for rule evaluation is used for faster actuation of the rules. We present experimental results to demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed rule engine framework over contemporary ones.