Abstract
Among programming languages, a popular one in corporate environments is Business Rules. These are conditional statements which can be seen as a sort of “programming for non-programmers”, since they remove loops and function calls, which are typically the most difficult programming constructs to master by laypeople. A Business Rules program consists of a sequence of “IF condition THEN actions” statements. Conditions are verified over a set of variables, and actions assign new values to the variables. Medium-sized to large corporations often enforce, document and define their business processes by means of Business Rules programs. Such programs are executed in a special purpose virtual machine which verifies conditions and executes actions in an implicit loop. A problem of extreme interest in business environments is enforcing high-level strategic decisions by configuring the parameters of Business Rules programs so that they behave in a certain prescribed way on average. In this paper we show that Business Rules are Turing-complete. As a consequence, we argue that there can exist no algorithm for configuring the average behavior of all possible Business Rules programs.
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The first author (OW) is supported by an IBM France/ANRT CIFRE Ph.D. thesis award.
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Wang, O., Ke, C., Liberti, L., de Sainte Marie, C. (2016). The Learnability of Business Rules. In: Pardalos, P., Conca, P., Giuffrida, G., Nicosia, G. (eds) Machine Learning, Optimization, and Big Data. MOD 2016. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10122. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-51469-7_22
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-51469-7_22
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