Implementation of Production Rules for a RIF Dialect: A MISMO Proof-of-Concept for Loan Rates

In June 2006, the Mortgage Industry Maintenance Organization (MISMO) began an initiative to help facilitate the electronic exchange of business rules between trading partners in the mortgage vertical. The Business Rules Exchange Workgroup (BREW) was subsequently formed to generate a charter and lead the adoption within the industry. BREW set out to create a proof-of concept (POC) to solve an often mentioned need for the exchange of rules: loan application pricing. A modified Production Rules (PR) extension to the working draft of the Rules Interchange Format (RIF) core design was developed by ILog and the well established MISMO schema was used as the ontology to share and execute a ruleset among ILOG JRules & JBOSS Rules in a distributed environment. A ruleset consisting of pricing rules were created using a decision table. ILOG Business Rules Engine(BRE) serialized these rules into a RIF ruleset. Using web services over HTTP , this ruleset was made available for consumption via web services allowing a client tool to consume the ruleset and push to a JBOSS Rules engine that had been exposed as a web service. Once the two systems shared the same ruleset, data payloads could then be sent to each rules engine for rule execution.