Choosing an AI and Business Rules Engine – Why Drools and KIE?

In the previous chapter, you saw how a rules-based AI approach could help solve your Excel problems. However, you’re not going to get very far without choosing a full business rules engine to execute your rules.

This chapter takes you through potential rule engine solutions available on the market and chooses one that we will use throughout the book. It also shows you why it’s important to think not only about solving your immediate problem but also about how you’re going to work with colleagues and scale your solution in the future. To do this, we are going to do the following:

• Understand the different types of people reading this book and find out which group you fall into
• Look at many of the available rule engines and evaluate them against our criteria
• Explain why open source provides a huge advantage for support and how it helps confirm our choice of which rule engine to...