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DMN-IDPy

API for user-friendly and flexible execution of DMN.

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Description:

The Decision Model and Notation (DMN) standard is a user-friendly notation standard for decision logic. It is easily readably by everyone involved in “decision management”, such as business people, IT experts and business analysts. However, the current usage of DMN – in which every model only has one way of executing it – does not make use of its full potential.

The DMN-IDPy API, based on the DMN-IDP interface, combines a DMN modeler with the IDP knowledge based system as an execution engine. This way, more flexible usages for a DMN model are “unlocked”. Indeed, usage of a DMN model is no longer limited to only the “bottom-to-top" approach. Indeed, among others, the API also allows “multidirectional reasoning”, in which any variable of a DMN model can be calculated from any other variables, thus removing the limitation of the “bottom-to-top" execution. A list of all features:

  • Load in DMN models via XML
  • Execute models using IDP, without having to know or learn it
  • “Standard” bottom-to-top execution approach
  • Multidirectional reasoning
  • Reasoning with incomplete information
  • Relevance (I.e., which variables should be known to calculate another one)
  • Querying the already “known variables”
  • Querying the variable type, and list of possible values
  • Optimization

The overarching goal of DMN-IDPy is to allow a user-friendly representation of knowledge in the form of DMN to build knowledge-based AI. Consider e.g. a chat bot, that has its “brain” encoded as a DMN model, or the behavior of a cobot modeled in simple DMN.

More Information:
Publications:

  • S. Vandevelde, V. Etikala, J. Vanthienen, J. Vennekens, "Leveraging the Power of IDP with the Flexibility of DMN: a Multifunctional API", in Proceedings of RuleML+RR21, 2021