The Business Rules service provides an execution and management environment for making business decisions in the cloud.
The service is ready to use as soon as you start it. It offers you a dedicated environment (processors, storage, network access) and a repository for your decision services, which your systems call to get answers to business questions.
You can choose to run your Business Rules service on servers in the US, in Europe or in APAC (Asia-Pacific). For advanced security and ownership, it is also available on Bluemix Dedicated, where you can select your data center from a long list of locations and where you benefit from an entirely dedicated network.

Modeling and deploying your decisions

The first thing to consider is modeling decisions – expressing the logic of your decisions, and what kind of data is important to drive that logic. For example, to determine if a customer is eligible for a loan, first you define the relevant data points (income, age, credit score, and so on), then you define the business logic that combines these data to make a decision on the customer’s eligibility for a particular loan.
The Business Rules service offers you two options for modeling decisions: Rule Designer and Decision Composer. Rule Designer targets a technical audience. Decision Composer is chiefly for less technical people, such as business analysts.
Rule Designer is an Eclipse-based environment you run locally. With it you can define the data types and business language that you use to express your business logic as business rules, decision tables, and ruleflows. You then deploy the business logic as a decision service to your Business Rules service on Bluemix for execution.
Decision Composer is an easy-to-use cloud-based modeling interface you can use to define your data and your business logic. You can also interactively test and troubleshoot your business logic before deploying it as a decision service to the Business Rules service.
Both Rule Designer and Decision Composer allow you to deploy the decision services you modeled to the Business Rules service on Bluemix. And the service has a console where you can manage and test the decision services you have deployed, before running them in production.

Calling decision services

You can securely invoke decision services on your Business Rules service from any application, whether it runs on-premises, or in the cloud; whether it’s an enterprise application, a web app, or a mobile app. The service gives you a fixed network access to the system, which can be used for deploying decision services, accessing the console, or invoking decisions services. This network access is based on HTTPS and authentication. The URL and your credentials are available in the service dashboard, in the “Connection Settings” tab.
Also, if you use IBM ODM Decision Center on-premises, you can manage and deploy decision services on Bluemix, just by configuring the deployment target of Decision Center. In this hybrid model, you keep the development and IT management on-premises, but run your decisions services in the cloud.

Integration

For further integration with API management tools (such as IBM API Connect), each decision service is self-documented, and can provide a WSDL, WADL or OpenAPI (Swagger) description.
See also this video showing the Business Rules service in action.
By Jerome Joubert and Peter Gilliver