Decision Groups

Mark Norton  10 February 2010 05:23:13 PM

The decision hierarchy is created by using higher level Decision Groups to group lower level Decision Groups and Decisions. Ostensibly, a Decision Group represents a complex decision, that is, a decision that requires many outcomes to be established before the decision-making requirement is complete. Rather than attempt to directly formulate a formula that creates many outcomes, it makes better sense to devolve a complex decision into multiple 'atomic' decisions that collectively establish all of the outcomes required by the complex decision. An atomic decision requires only one outcome to be established and is therefore the simplest point at which to define a formula to establish that outcome.

In practice, there are several reasons that determine when a Decision Group is used:

• As a purely conceptual grouping of lower-level Decision Groups and Decisions to help capture the domain knowledge associated with the business rules.
• As a purely conceptual grouping of lower-level Decision Groups and Decisions to make the Decision Model easier to understand and manage.
• To execute groups of Decisions on the same element in a collection
• To identify and record an execution context in the context stack (i.e. which element in a collection is currently being considered for each decision/decision group)
• To provide context for an ExternalContext operator.

• Comments [0]