In developing rule-based systems, ERS has determined that adhering to a set of simple and straightfowared development practices significantly increases the maintainability and customer adoption of rule bases. In today's enviroment, you can't afford to reimplement systems whenever the business changes it's policies. The following rules can help you develop a better more maintainable rule base and can save your projects from spiraling maintenance costs and key person dependencies down the road.

	Best practices for rule-based systems:
	Use a Repository - preferably decoupled from the execution engine Use a Rule Engine for execution Use a Rete-Based engine Find out how Rete works, Click Here

	Best practices for rules:
	Atomic rules should express one concept or relation; Concise rules should only describe facts relevant to the relationship, e.g. don't talk about a loan value if it's not cogent to the relation; Abstract rules should not replicate code, i.e. no two rules should share two or more conditions; Non-Procedural rules should not refer to other rules firing or explicitly 'order' rule execution;

To view our flash animation of our Best Practices Click Here