Ficoblazeadvisordecisionruleshowitworks4202wp 160302225024

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How It Works
Updated for Release 7.3
March 2016
FICO Blaze Advisor decision rules management system

is a complete solution for enterprise decision management.
It includes an architectural framework for building decision
management applications and state-of-the-art tools for
deploying and maintaining decision services (also known
as rule services). In this white paper, youll learn about using
Blaze Advisor for rule authoring, implementation, deployment,
and testing and maintenance, and how Blaze Advisor can be
extended with analytics, simulations and a number of additional
products within FICOs Decision Management suite.
Introduction to Decision Management Suite
Automation
FICO Blaze Advisor

Decision Rules
Management
System
Shared
Logic
Safety &
Security
Decision
Rules
Value
Architecture
Management
Data
Access
Collaboration
Transparency
2016 Fair Isaac Corporation. All rights reserved.
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FICO Blaze Advisor Decision Rules Management System
Decision rules management, also called business rules management, is software

that provides organizations with a number of advantages.
Automation: Organizations can automate high-volume operational decisions
quickly and effectively while maintaining business control over those decisions.
Safety & Security: Business analysts can maintain decision logic used in IT
systems safely and securely without being dependent on technical resources.
This reduces application modification time and speeds organizational
response to changing conditions. It can also significantly reduce the total
cost of ownership for the application over time.
Architecture: Application developers can use architectures that separate
the decision logic from the application control logic. The logic that represents
business decisions can be maintained independently of the application
code and can be updated without stopping and restarting the applications.
The rules in these decisions can be reviewed and understood by business
analysts. Separating the decision logic from procedural code also allows faster
development of the decision logic.
Shared Logic: Decision logic can be shared across applications, promoting
consistent behavior throughout the enterprise. This becomes more important
as organizations offer services over multiple channels such as web self-service,
call center and mobile access.
Decision Rules: Decision rules can be defined, reviewed and maintained
using a variety of different formats, such as decision tables, decision trees,
scorecards, decision graphs and customized templates. This means that any
set of rules can be displayed in the most practical and natural way, allowing a
clear understanding of their purpose and interrelationship, even in a multi-step
decision process.
Management: Decision rules management technology provides an excellent
platform for a coherent approach to automating and improving operational
decisions. The impact of new rules can be assessed before the rules go into
production, improving decisions by comparing alternative approaches and
preventing costly errors in strategies that might otherwise be missed.
Collaboration: Business analysts can collaborate and gain visibility into the
authorization process for business rules using lifecycle management.
Value: Organizations can add value to their business processes by using
decision rules to personalize their services, dialogs and content, based on
user profile data and process characteristics.
Data Access: Businesses can make automated decisions based on data
accessed as needed from a variety of sources, including multiple databases,
XML documents, Java objects, .NET/COM objects and COBOL copybooks.
Transparency: Decision rules management brings transparency to business
processes. It allows organizations to track how and why certain decisions
were made to demonstrate regulatory compliance.
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Introducing FICO
Blaze Advisor
decision rules
management system
FICO Blaze Advisor decision rules management system is a complete solution for
enterprise decision management encompassing decision modeling, decision service
design, authoring, testing simulation, deployment and maintenance. A decision service
(also known as rule service) is defined as a monolithic view of all the conditions and
actions that need to be considered in performing a self-contained, callable decisioning
service from a larger application. The following graphic illustrates how Blaze Advisors
functional components interact with business applications and data.
Blaze Advisor components integrate business applications and data (internal or external)
What is a decision service?
A decision service (also known as rule service)
can be defined as a self-contained, callable
component with a view of all the conditions and
actions that need to be considered to make an
operational business decision.
More simply, a decision service is a component
or service that answers a business question
for other services. Decision services use your
data, and the insights derived from it, to drive
automated decisioning. Decision services
also isolate the logic behind your operational
decisions, separating it from business
processes and the mechanical operations of
procedural application code. A decision service
represents a single point of decision-making
across all your systems and processes. As such,
it allows you to focus resources on improving
and optimizing decisions. You can reuse
decision services across multiple applications
in many different operational environments.
Decision services can also eliminate the time,
cost and technical risk of trying to reprogram
multiple individual systems simultaneously to
keep up with changing business requirements.
Rules-Driven Business or Operational Application
I need a
decision
component
Rule Engine/Rule Server

Deployment Manager
API
Web
Service
Rule Repository
FICO Blaze Advisor

Desktop
Development
Environment
Applications could be:
Industry
Data
Cloud or On-Premise
Web-Based
Decision Authoring
and Management
Product recommendation
Regulatory compliance
Account management
Forms selection
Customer
Proles
Enterprise
Data
Fraud detection
Data validation
Customer rating
Financial risk analysis
A business application asks a decision service to perform some business function

(for example, to provide a business assessment, classify and diagnose information,
recommend an action or validate data).
The decision service is executed using the FICO Blaze Advisor Rule Server, which
manages scalability, multiple service requests, rule updates and more.
These Blaze Advisor components access any necessary data sources to obtain
information as needed to perform the service.
The rules that drive the decision service are maintained in a repository that provides
the service with the latest definitions of rules that are updated by users in the
development environment, also known as the IDE and maintenance applications.
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Blaze Advisor Rule Maintenance Applications (RMA) support controlled rule creation,
maintenance and decision service lifecycle management by business analysts
through visual and intuitive web interfaces. The RMA supports several languages.
Analytics assets such as predictive models can be imported into Blaze Advisor
for rapid deployment.
Blaze Advisors integrated development environment (IDE) is used for the technical
definition of the decision service (also known as rule service). As an Eclipse plugin, Blaze Advisors IDE is a complete environment for rule service design, rule
authoring, rule testing and configuration of custom templates for rules.
A sampling of the types of decision services our customers have built includes:
Advertising scheduling and availability
Diagnostic advice
Benefits eligibility determination
Insurance underwriting
Claims handling
Problem resolution procedures
Credit approval and limit determination
Product assembly configuration
Credit collection strategies
Product recommendations
Data validation
Regulatory compliance
Interactions Between Business Processes, Applications,

Data and Rules
Generally, business applications invoke a decision service (also known as rule service)
for a decision just as they would invoke a database for data. The results of the decision
process can be used to drive further operations and interactions. When invoked,
a decision service uses the application data (referenced as any combination of
Java objects, database records, XML documents, Microsoft .NET/COM+ objects,
Cobol copybook data or custom-defined objects) to make decisions based on the
application data and decision rules. The decision results can be passed back to the
calling application or can be defined as actions taken in the decision process. Actions
might include database update messages, calls to external applications or use of Java
or .NET methods on objects. Decision services are often invoked by steps in business
processes. As a part of FICOs Decision Management suite, Blaze Advisor can also carry
out optimized strategies and execute sophisticated analytic models when advanced
mathematics are needed.
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FICO Blaze Advisor decision rules management system

FICO
Blaze
Advisor
Rule Server
Predened Rule Services

Rule Service #1
Decision
Processes
Rules
Models
Rule Service #2
Rule Engine
Execution
Decision
Processes
Rules
Decision
Processes
Rules
Customer
Data
Operational
Data
Bureau
Data
Event
Listener
Models
Email
Web
API Call
Response/
Recommendation
Returned to
Application
Web Service
Invocation
Application
Direct Mail
Control
Returned to
Application
Etc.
Call Center
Cellular
Application
Makes
Explicit Call
Communicate
Back to Requesting
Application
Internal/External Data Sources
Transactional
Data
Event or
Transaction
Occurs
Activate
Appropriate
Rule Service
Models
Rule Service #3
Interactive/Batch
Application,
Process, Channel
ATM
Blaze Advisor decision services (also known as rule services) respond to triggering events from an application and provide results using data
from any data source.
Rules Use Corporate Data Sources

Rules rely upon data values to test conditions, and they may specify actions that
update data for use outside the decision service (also known as rule service).
The data that rules operate against is provided by any external business object
model that either:
Conforms to a known standard (JavaBeans, EJB, JDBC, Microsoft .NET/COM+/
DCOM, W3C XML, OMG CORBA); or
Is accessible via Java and the Blaze Advisor Business Object Model Adapter.
Internally, Blaze Advisor maintains references to data in an object/property model
representation analogous to native Java. For instance, a Customer object might
be defined as having properties of Account Number, First Name, Last Name, Age,
Account Balance and so on. Each property has a specified class (for example, string,
date, integer, money) that tells the system how to format it and perform operations
upon it. All data items are worked within Blaze Advisor using this object/property
concept, regardless of their representation outside the decision service. Objects can
inherit properties from parent objects, so you could define a Customer object and
then define a VIP Customer that automatically takes on all the properties of Customer,
with additional properties of Personal Representative and Credit Line.
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If you already have data definitions (also known as object models or data models),
you can import them and automatically create corresponding object/property
references to them for use in rules. This eliminates the need to reenter object
definitions manually. Internal (rule-system-specific) object model representations can
be created from external object models created with Java objects/JavaBeans, COM/
CORBA/.NET objects, XML schemas or relational database table definitions. Blaze
Advisor includes proprietary utilities called Business Object Model Adapters (BOMA)
that read or introspect the external data source definitions, create an object/property
representation and build automatic read/update links to the external data source for
real-time reference in rule conditions or actions. You can also define data structures
natively in Blaze Advisor using Business Terms, which can be mapped to external
data structures at a later point. Business Terms are especially useful in that they allow
business users to define their own data structures for rule authoring.
Object Model Import Wizards

automatically connect to
external data sources for
immediate use in writing rules.
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Rules Authoring
Blaze Advisor provides two methods for authoring rules:

Blaze Advisor Eclipse plug-in
Web-based Rule Maintenance Applications (RMA)
The Blaze Advisor Eclipse plug-in is an integrated development environment (IDE).
Using the IDE, a technical developer can:
Import an object model
Create rules, rulesets, functions and other entities associated with the rules
Test, debug, explore and report on rule projects
Generate rule deployments
Create the custom template for business analysts to create and maintain rules
Generate a web-based RMA
The RMA enables business analysts and technical developers alike to create and
maintain rules via a web application. In this environment, a user can:
Define business terms
Define and update rules in any number of formats
Validate rules by running verification queries, data profiling and unit tests
Assess business impact using simulation
Publish decision service (also known as rule service) updates via the
approval workflow
Manage users and roles
Structured Rule Language

Blaze Advisor provides a powerful rule syntax called Structured Rule Language (SRL)
that provides a consistent and unambiguous way to specify the rules. The SRL syntax
uses English language keywords, and allows for both compact and expanded styles of
rule representation to suit different needs and different developers preferences.
Here is a simple business rule expressed three different ways in SRL. All three formats
are valid and are functionally equivalent. Rule authors may mix syntax styles between
rules or within a single rule. The decision as to which format to use depends upon
user preference.

If
customer.debt > customer.assets
then
customer.application.status = Declined.
If
the debt of the customer is greater than the assets of the customer
then
the status of the application of the customer is Declined.
If
the customers debt exceeds the customers assets
then
set the status of the customers application to Declined.
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Terms such as is greater than and exceeds are predefined within SRL. There are
more than 100 keywords and language phrases to make rule definition as natural and
intuitive as possible. Special language constructs exist to deal with strings, currencies,
dates, missing data and operations over groups of data matching user-specified
patterns or criteria.
Blaze Advisor SRL includes

syntax and keywords that are
close to English.
If at least 2 children satisfy age < 8 then set discount to 0.25

If Products ID does not start with SPX then the Promotion Status of the Product is False
If the name of the customer is unknown then print [Please enter your name]
If orders purchase date is earlier than January 1, 2002
then print [Your purchase is no longer eligible for return]
Senior male is any customer such that (age > 65 and gender is male)
When more power is required within a rule for doing complex procedural calculations,
looping or calling upon external applications, SRL again allows these operations to be
done within the rule language rather than forcing the use of an external programming
language. This allows rules to remain independent of their execution environment so
that customers do not need to make changes to their decision logic when they install
a new operating system or compiler release.
Blaze Advisor SRL includes

function definitions for
procedural operations when
needed.
_monthlyPayment is a real initially 0.0.

_monthlyPayment = (amount * (plan.rate/12) *
Math.pow((1 + (plan.rate/12)), plan.numberOfPayments)) /
(Math.pow((1 + (plan.rate/12)), plan.numberOfPayments) - 1).
return_monthlyPayment.
FICO Blaze Advisor includes a wide range of built-in syntax options and operations,
and is ideally suited to represent a variety of industry-specific terminologies. Business
analysts can also choose from a broad set of editors to define rules without using SRL.
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Decision Tables
Many organizations implement key decisions through the use of decision tables. This
is especially true where the business rules are based on a small number of conditions,
with each rule corresponding to a particular combination of data values or value ranges.
Common examples include rate tables, pricing charts and discount schedules. The
postage chart on the wall of your local post office is an example of a decision table,
based on shipping method, weight and destination.
Blaze Advisor supports decision tables as a way to define and maintain large numbers
of rules in a compact format that is easy to visualize and work with. Designers can
choose to display their tables in a variety of formats, including single-axis or doubleaxis, multiple condition rows or columns, by single value or value ranges, and with color
and font formatting as desired. Cell contents can be simple values or any complex
action allowed within the SRL syntax. Tables can efficiently handle many thousands of
rule conditions and actions.
With decision tables, users can conveniently import data and export data to
Microsoft Excel. Users can also edit decision tables directly in Excel by using
a Blaze Advisor RMA.
Blaze Advisor decision tables

display large numbers of
conditions and actions in
a variety of formats.
Income
25,000 34,999
25,000 34,999
25,000 34,999
35,000 44,999
35,000 44,999
Card Type
Poor
Good
Excellent
Poor
Good
Credit Limit
2,500
3,500
4,000
3,000
3,500
Income
Card Type
Credit Limit
1-Axis Vertical
1-Axis Horizontal
2-Axis Grid
25,001 35,000
Student Bronze
2,500
25,001 35,000
Student Gold
3,000
25,001 35,000
Student Platinum
4,000
Card Type
Student Bronze
Student Gold
Student Platinum
35,001 45,000
Student Bronze
3,000
Credit Rating
Poor
Good
Excellent
35,001 45,000
Student Gold
3,500
Homeowner?
False
True
True
35,001 45,000
Student Platinum
4,500
Income
Credit Limit
Credit Limit
Credit Limit
> 45,000
Student Bronze
4,200
25,001 35,000
2,500
3,000
4,000
> 45,000
Student Gold
4,700
35,001 45,000
3,000
3,500
4,500
> 45,000
Student Platinum
5,200
> 45,000
4,200
4,700
5,200
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Decision Trees
Another convenient way to represent sets of interrelated decisions is with decision trees.
Decision trees allow you to trace a chain of conditions to a single appropriate action.
Looking at branches coming from a decision point (or node) in the tree lets you quickly
confirm that all applicable possibilities have been accounted for.
FICO Blaze Advisor supports decision trees with the flexibility to specify any number
of levels and condition branches. Branches for a split are automatically generated based
on the branch values specified by the user, ensuring complete range coverage and no
overlap. The action nodes contain a single action value assignment. The visual tree
editor allows interactive focus on any branch or node of the tree and dynamic updating
of conditions and action.
Blaze Advisor decision trees show a chain of conditions leading to a specific action.
Scorecards
FICO Blaze Advisor lets you define and execute scorecards within a decision service
(also known as rule service). A scorecard gives you an easy way to combine many
factors into an overall measurement that can be used to drive your decisions. By
assigning your own categories, ranges and associated scores to individual criteria, you
can build up additive scores that predict things such as a customers relative worth,
a prospects likelihood to accept a promotional offer or a mechanical components
probability of failing within a given configuration.
For companies in sectors such as finance, government or other highly regulated
disciplines, Blaze Advisor allows you to set, capture and record significant factors
in calculating a score. By defining your own reason codes, scorecards become an
auditable component of your decision processes. You can also import scorecards
defined in PMML.
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Blaze Advisor scorecards

show component factors and
weights leading to an overall
ranking score.
Decision Flow
A decision flow lets users create a data flow for a decision service (also known as rule
service) to control the order in which the decision entities are executed. A decision flow
can have splits, decision steps, loops, subflows and flow variables. Using these controls,
the user can define the orchestration of rules in a way that is intuitive and easy to
communicate with others.
Blaze Advisor decision flows control the execution order of decision entities with preview support.
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Formula Builder
The Formula Builder lets you create both simple and complex formulas without having
to use Structured Rule Language (SRL). This feature makes formulas easy to construct
and read. Business analysts can provide numeric input or enable formulas to derive
that input using a wide variety of formula construction features, such as set operations,
functions, expressions and others. For example, you could use SRL to write the
following expression:

AllAccounts[every Account].balance.avg
Formula Builder provides a quicker method of choosing formula elements from prepopulated lists that requires no knowledge of SRL syntax and prevents spelling errors.
Grouping Rules
Organizations may have large numbers of rules reflecting many different types of
decisions. Quite often it is possible to identify a subset of rules that contribute to a
particular decision or part of an overall process, but that do not directly affect other
parts of the applications decision-making.
Blaze Advisor allows technical developers to group such rules into a ruleset. Rulesets
offer important benefits in performance and organization. Functional groups within a
company can work on rules belonging to them by accessing a particular ruleset. It also
makes it possible to quickly find and edit rules covering a particular function by locating
the ruleset dealing with that function. Rulesets also contribute to performance tuning,
because individual rulesets can be set to use optimized inferencing (Rete III), sequential
execution or compiled sequential execution for rule engine evaluation.
Rules and other decision process components may be grouped and stored in logical
folders or physical files. Groups of developed components can be thought of as libraries
of code that can be shared by different projects and applications.
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Business Terms
Business analysts who maintain their own rules sometimes prefer to use their own
expressions for authoring rules that are independent of the operational data model
or the application data model. This allows faster rule implementation while reducing
dependency on other teams. Blaze Advisors Business Terms feature is designed to
meet this need.
With Business Terms, users can define their own terms, value lists and term
calculations in the RMA, and use these terms to author rules, decision tables and other
decision entities. They only need to import the data model when they have completed
the rules and are ready to publish the decision service (also known as rule service).
Business Terms enables business analysts to augment the data model by adding their
own derived variables.
Blaze Advisor Business Terms

is used by business analysts
to define their own vocabulary.
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Advanced Rule Features

A number of specialized decision logic issues often becomes apparent in rule-driven
applications. These include:
Effective dates for rules
Often a rule will have a lifespan, outside of which it is not relevant. FICO Blaze Advisor supports explicit effective dates
that can be dened for each and every rule, enabling the right rules to be executed while ensuring that ineffective rules
have no impact on performance.
Engine mode
Blaze Advisor provides different engine modes so users can choose the most appropriate mode based on the nature of
the rules in order to meet business and performance requirements. For example, if backward chaining is a desired
capability for a specic set of rules, the optimized inferencing mode is the best choice. On the other hand, if a set of
rules needs to be evaluated in a certain order and transaction volume is large, the compiled sequential mode may prove
to be the best choice.
Data patterns
On many occasions a rule may be relevant to a group of data items. The ability to refer to data patterns in rules means
that rules can be made more widely applicable. This reduces the number of rules required and thus speeds
development and improves performance. The data pattern syntax involves dening a pattern from class membership,
set membership, data attributes or any combination of these.
Rule priorities
Within a ruleset it is occasionally desirable to ensure that some rules execute before others are considered. Blaze Advisor
provides rule priorities that can be set for each rule, allowing ne-grained control over rule precedence within rulesets.
Naturally, within sequential execution rulesets, all rule-ring order is explicitly determined.
Functions
Some business denitions may not be represented best as a declarative business rule. When a procedural statement is
the best t, Blaze Advisor provides a Function capability that avoids having to use an external programming language,
thereby reducing complexity and processing overhead. This allows you to control conditionally looped processing,
incorporate Java methods and other advanced mathematical functions, or use calls to external processes.
Event rules and

goal-driven reasoning
Specic rule operations may be desired when information changes or when certain information is needed by rules.
Blaze Advisor allows event rules that specify event conditions. In conjunction with other rules, these can be used to
provide goal-driven (or backward chaining) reasoning. This can ensure that expensive data access is accessed only
when it is essential.
Question sets
For forms-based applications where rules are used to drive the questions asked of a user, questions are typically
presented in groups. Blaze Advisor provides question sets to allow questions to be grouped together
to improve the user experience and to reduce the amount of programming.
Decision Management for Business Analysts

Organizations often want to enable business analysts to take more direct control over
the decisions used in the companys automated systems. In a decision management
system, this control translates to rule maintenance the ability to review, alter, create
and delete the rules that implement business policies. Business analysts without
technical training need a dedicated software application to give them the power and
control necessary to do their work without exposing them to programming code.
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Blaze Advisors Rule Maintenance Application is such a tool. The RMA is a web-based
tool that provides complete decision management functions to business analysts for
the creation, maintenance and deployment of decision rules. RMA users do not need
to know SRL; the editors provide an intuitive authoring experience for authoring rules
in different formats such as decision tables, decision trees, scorecards and decision
graphs. The RMA also provides a set of powerful tools to business analysts to test and
validate the rules for logic correctness.
Business analysts use an

intuitive drag-and-drop tool
to create rules.
The lifecycle management component in the RMA enables authorized users to

review and approve changes made by others and to publish approved changes to
an environment for testing or production. Users with administrative responsibilities
can manage other users and create audit reports on all activities.
Business analysts author rules in

the RMA governed by an approval
workflow.
Users gain access to the rule maintenance editors through a standard login with their
ID and password. Authorization facilities can control who has access to different types
of template instances. As users make changes to template instances, including adding
new instances or deleting old ones, the change history is persisted to allow tracking
changes and reverting to older versions.
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Building Custom Rule Maintenance Applications

While the default RMA provides the capability for authoring all types of new rules, some
businesses prefer to constrain the range of activities or values business analysts can
modify. This can be achieved by using custom templates. A custom template indicates
a basic pattern to be followed by all rules of this type, indicating what can and cannot
be changed. Technical developers can create different templates for different kinds of
rules. Templates can also constrain other Blaze Advisor entities such as rulesets, lists
of values, component syntax segments that can be reused by multiple rules, and more.
Each of the replaceable fields in a template is referred to as a value holder.
Once a template is created, the next step is to specify what the user is allowed to put
in the value holders. Blaze Advisor allows the technical developer to create constraints
on each value holder. Some fields can allow type-in entries, while others present choice
lists. Allowed values can be predefined in a static list, pulled at runtime from a database
or other outside data source, or based on the results of other rules that have fired. The
constraints for what may be entered in the value holders are referred to as providers
in Blaze Advisor. Technical developers can also specify whether an entry is mandatory,
optional or if it allows multiple values.
Obviously, templates are a very powerful way to organize and constrain different
types of rules. You might create one template instance to represent current corporate
policies and another with new rules under consideration for possible implementation.
Either template instance could be loaded for use by your RMA or for testing in the
development environment. The following table summarizes the three key aspects of
maintaining rules according to a particular structure:
Rules Management
Components
Templates provide design patterns for rules, sections of rules or groupings of rules. They contain static
sections and replaceable value holders. Templates can be reused to create distinct decision services.
Providers act as controls on allowed values for the value holders in a template. They specify how
many values are allowed, whether information should be typed in or presented in a list, what formats
are valid and more.
One template can be used to create many instances, each of which is a distinct entity with its own
unique conditions and actions.
The utilities for creating custom rule maintenance applications are accessed by technical
developers through the FICO Blaze Advisor development environment. Intuitive editors
let technical developers choose the values or terms in a rule that should be exposed
to the business analyst. Only those parts of the rule that are exposed will be editable
in an RMA. Display properties let the developer present the editable and static parts of
the template to the business analyst in any format desired, incorporating text, HTML
formatting, and interaction formats such as radio buttons or drop-down menus that let
the business analyst work in a business context, rather than having to read rule syntax.
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Templates specify what

items are presented to business
analysts in a Rule Maintenance
Application (RMA).
The final step is to use the Rule Maintenance Application Generator to create the webbased rule maintenance application that the users will access. In the wizard you can
choose titles and display characteristics for the web pages, what overall control buttons
should be presented to the users and how files should be listed in the RMA.
The ability to customize the

display of the template instances
allows the technical developer to
provide business analysts with a
customized editing experience.
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Rules Implementation
Repository Management and Version Controls

FICO Blaze Advisor stores rules and other project information in an XML-based
repository. The repository can be implemented in an SQL database, in a no-SQL
database such as MongoDB or in flat files in a standard file directory structure.
Blaze Advisor can work with Source Code Management (SCM) systems to enable
check-out, check-in and access control of files containing developed decision process
components. FICO has also created a special repository versioning service, Blaze
Versioning System (BVS), that integrates with both file-based and database-based
repositories. Organizations can choose which versioning and source management
system they wish to use, based on their internal development standards and desired
functionality. Links to third-party SCM commands can be accessed directly from
Blaze Advisor menus.
Blaze Advisor versioning capabilities lets techncial developers specify which rules and
components should be tracked for version changes at an individual level. As business
analysts use their rule maintenance applications to modify, add or delete rules, their
changes are tracked and stored for later review and action. Each change is associated
with a version number, the responsible author, the date and time of the change, and
a comment for reference. Past versions can be viewed in a quick-reference history list
or in a detailed syntax review. Multiple versions can be viewed in a split-screen mode to
allow side-by-side comparison. If users need to roll back their changes to a previous
version, the process is easy with single-button-click reinstatement of a past version
to the current working version.
The Blaze RMA permits

versioning of rules for easy
tracking, comparison and
reinstatement.
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Identify and merge differences

using the Visual Differences editor.
With a versioned repository, users can compare
different versions of a rule using the Visual
Differences editor. This allows the users to
visually see the differences between two
versions, and if desired, merge the differences.
Management Properties, Queries and Filters

FICO Blaze Advisor is a centerpiece of FICOs integrated approach to Decision
Management. Management of rule projects requires an ability to keep track of many
different rules and decision service components. Large-scale systems with multiple
development teams may work with thousands or even tens of thousands of rules.
Management Properties help technical users track and find items within a rule project.
Blaze Advisor automatically keeps track of many attributes, such as creation date, last
edit date, author, version and so on. But the real power comes in attaching your own
properties to items such as rules, decision trees, decision flows and more. You can
keep track of any property you wish to declare responsible department, compliance
regulation reference or development status. All of these properties can be queried and
used to find matching objects within a single ruleset or an entire development project.
Management properties with custom labels and values can be used to find matching objects
in the repository.
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Queries are a powerful management tool, and Blaze Advisor allows tremendous
flexibility when using them. In addition to simple queries of Management Properties,
technical developers can create complex queries using the full power of the Blaze
Advisor Java APIs to match and filter on a wide variety of attributes. Business analysts
can develop and run queries in the RMA. Search and replace allows large-scale
terminology changes to an entire rule project at once. Queries can be added to the
Blaze Advisor Cross-Reference Browser to extend its power.
Queries allow you to search

for template instances based
on different attributes and
management properties.
Release Management
Software development requires efficient release management to promote tested
projects to production status and to ensure a stable upgrade process. FICO Blaze
Advisor includes release management as a built-in function. A complete decision
process or a library of developed rules, tables, trees and other decision assets can
be frozen as a released version and referenced by external applications or other rule
projects. The released version is stored as a snapshot in time, separate from the main
development source. Further development will not affect the operation of the released
version. Blaze Advisor allows multiple released versions to coexist for flexibility in use
and auditing.
Large team-based development projects also benefit from Blaze Advisors ability
to support a combination of shared and private workspaces. A technical developer
can download a copy of the main development code to his or her personal computer
and work disconnected from the corporate shared repository. After development and
unit testing have been completed in the private workspace, changes can be uploaded
to the shared repository and made available to other technical developers. A full set
of synchronization utilities allows technical developers to retrieve and upload specific
items or entire projects, libraries and groups.
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Blaze Advisor contains release management functions to:

Publish your project or workspace to a target repository, making it easy to move
releases between environments. You can choose to publish a complete copy
or just the updated items.
Import or export projects so that you can change the type of repository connection
you are using or reuse project components in another project.
Tag a project that has completed testing with a release number, and release it
to another location in the same repository.
Use filters to select only those items that you want to include when you release
or publish a project.
Generate a single deployable binary file for a compiled project and use the file
for deployment in other environments.
These features allow you to use Blaze Advisor in a robust development/test/QA/
production environment or in a much simpler one as required by specific projects.
Release a project to make a copy

of it in the same repository.
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For business analysts who use an RMA to maintain their business rules, Blaze Advisor
provides an optional approval workflow to govern the release process. When enabled,
changes must be reviewed and approved by the designated approver before they are
published.
Business analysts can

publish approved rule
changes in the RMA.
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Testing
Verification, Validation and Testing Rules

As the problems being solved with business rules get more complex, the need to
validate and verify business rules becomes greater. Moreover, manual and automated
testing of rule changes is often required before any changes can be put into
production. FICO Blaze Advisor has several tools that facilitate testing. The Verifier
performs a wide variety of static verification tests on decision entities in a project.
It uses algorithms to highlight areas of potential conflict, inefficiencies in your rule
architecture and semantic errors. Any anomalies that are found are reported in the
Verification Results panel, along with the type, severity and location in the project
where they were detected. A filter function allows you to select only those items
that you want included for verification and validation, allowing you to focus on those
elements that are ready for testing. Verification instances can be developed, modified
and managed in your repository so that you can manage the various kinds of tests
you want to apply at different stages of your project.
The Verifier gives clear guidance

on problems with the rules based
on user-selected criteria.
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While verification may be performed by both business analysts and technical

developers, technical developers also need to be able to establish formal tests for
business rules quickly and effectively. FICO Blaze Advisor contains a BRUnit
test framework built on the industry standard xUnit framework. BRUnit stands for
Business Rules Unit. This testing framework is fully integrated into Blaze Advisor. It
provides technical developers with a convenient way of unit testing business rules
applications. BRUnit allows you to write and organize test cases into suites, which can
be stored in the same repository as your rules. You can run the test cases as often as
necessary. The BRUnit Test Runner in the Builder IDE lets you quickly see which tests
failed and which ones passed.
The BRUnit Test Runner shows

the results of applying regression
tests to updated rules.
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The RMA has additional tools for the business analysts to test the rules with bulk data.
The Decision Testing tool in the RMA allows users to upload a csv file that contains
the test data and execute a selected ruleset or other entities with the test data. The
result is displayed in the RMA and can also be downloaded. This tool includes a
wizard that guides the user through the configuration of the required test data.
Business analysts use Decision Testing in the RMA to validate the rules.
For decision tables and decision graphs, you can attach a dataset (csv file) to evaluate
the distribution of data records. This type of profiling allows you to visualize the
impact of the sample data.
Data profiling in a decision graph

helps to visualize the impact of
the sample data.
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Decision Management Performance

Its critical to keep a constant pulse on the entire IT system, and Blaze Advisor delivers
deployment tools to easily monitor and manage the IT ecosystem. Blaze Advisor
has monitoring classes that capture information at all levels rule server, decision
services (also known as rule services), rules session, down to the execution level but
it requires coding. By wrapping monitoring classes around the JMX Framework in Java,
coding to use monitoring classes is eliminated and users only need to subscribe to
JMX events. For .NET, you would use MOM standards-based for .NET instead of the
JMX Framework. Not only is it simple to integrate with management consoles, but its
a better fit into IT processes. For instance, if an organization uses IBM Tivoli with the
standard JMX interface, Blaze Advisor can be registered into these environments so
that its possible to monitor and manage both the IBM Websphere application server
and rules execution, lowering administrative costs.
Now that all the events are available in the monitoring framework, all the monitoring
class activity can be logged to a file. The logging framework eliminates coding with an
out-of-the-box configuration file that integrates with industry standard logging tools with
adapters available for Log4J, Java Logging, Simple logging, Log4Net, Windows Events
for .NET and open API for customer adapters.
In addition to configuration and execution monitoring and management, Blaze Advisor
also supports decision performance monitoring, also known as business activity
monitoring (BAM). The business performance of your strategy can be captured through
user-defined events. The BAM framework pushes business performance information
into a datamart, providing the building blocks for strategy orchestration/championchallenger strategies.
One such monitor, the User-Defined Event Monitor, receives notifications about userdefined events. You can add SRL code to your project to send custom notifications
during the execution of a rule service. For example, you can add SRL code that sends
notifications when certain rules fire or when certain functionals are invoked.
Deployment
FICO Blaze Advisor Rule Server lets you deploy rule projects as decision services
(also known as rule services). A decision service can be deployed on a supported
server platform so that the decision logic encapsulated in the service can be
accessible to multiple, concurrent, distributed clients.
Deploying a rule project as a decision service involves:
Configuring a Rule Server for your deployment platform
Specifying the rule project for the service
Defining the service entry points that allow clients to access the service
Entry points are business methods that define the data to be passed to the service as
arguments at runtime, and the results the client can expect to be returned.
Blaze Advisor provides Quick Deployer Wizards that guide you through these steps
and generate the appropriate code and configuration files for your deployment.
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Rule Execution
Data manipulation through object/property references may use standardized input/
output facilities for the data type (for example, database open/read/write commands),
or may call on methods defined and stored with the object.
Rule Execution Components
Decision Flows graphically dene the sequence of execution steps in a decision process, using
events, loops, branches and tasks. Each task in the decision flow is dened by a collection of rules
(ruleset), a decision table, a function or a subordinate decision flow, to name a few examples.
Decision flows are reusable across multiple decision services.
Rulesets are groups of rules organized for clarity and efciency of denition, execution and
maintenance. Rules in a ruleset are executed as called upon by decision flow tasks. Rulesets, like
all component types mentioned in this section, are reusable across multiple decision flows and
decision services.
Decision Tables display rows and columns representing different conditions, and the resulting
action or returned data value is dened by their intersection. Decision table data can be imported
from external sources.
Decision Trees graphically depict chains of dependent conditions leading to an action. Trees can
be imported from FICO Model Builder, where they can be designed based on a combination of
statistical data analysis and company policies.
Scorecards are a special form of a table that examines different properties or characteristics of an
object or transaction, and assigns weights based on the values. All underlying weights are added to
arrive at an overall score, which can be compared against other scores for a rank-based decision.
Advanced features include the ability to track signicant factors in the overall score.
Functions perform algorithmic or procedural processing, such as calculations, and execute
external services. Blaze Advisor contains a rich programming syntax called Structured Rule
Language (SRL) that allows array handling, looping, case selections and other manipulations familiar
to programmers. SRL reduces or eliminates the need to link to external programs as part of a
rule-based decision process.
A rule is defined as a statement that defines or constrains some aspect of the

business.... It is atomic in that it cannot be broken down or decomposed.
A rule explicitly defines what action should result from a given set of conditions. Rules
are often referred to as declarative because they declare a particular result that must
occur any time the corresponding conditions are met.
As an example, consider a rule (expressed here in SRL for adjusting status and
premiums of accountholders):

If

the Outstanding_balance of Customers account exceeds $1000

and the Standing of Customers Account is Overdue and
Customers ID starts with AX3

Then

set Customers Status to Watchlist and increment Customers

Rate by 0.05.
This example is fairly simple. The conditions examine specific characteristics of the
customer and his or her account to determine the appropriate follow-up action and
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rate adjustment. While individual rules of this sort can be simple to describe, the many
possible combinations of condition values requires a way to quickly look at many rules
to see which ones are appropriate.
For instance, consider the company in the previous example. If it has categories for
four different types of account standings, 10 balance amount categories and 25
customer ID segments, there are 1,000 different combinations of possible conditions.
The rule engine must locate one rule to be executed based on the one corresponding
combination of conditions. To make matters more complex, there are three different
properties that must be read in order to make the appropriate rule selection decision
(Outstanding_balance, Account_standing and Customer_ID).
Blaze Advisor contains an advanced rule engine that delivers maximum performance
for online/interactive and batch applications of rules. To accomplish this, it offers
both optimized inference execution of rules and sequential execution of rules, each
of which performs better in certain circumstances. Because the rule syntax is the
same for all execution modes, and individual rulesets can be executed using the ideal
approach, Blaze Advisor users can optimize performance across a range of systems
and platforms without changing their code.
Inferencing Execution
Blaze Advisor contains a rule engine that can execute rules based on an optimization
of the Rete algorithm known as optimized inferencing (Rete III). This algorithm uses
rapid pattern matching to relate the conditions that are true at any given moment to
the appropriate rule or rules. In the account handling rule example, Blaze Advisor is
much more efficient at determining that this rule is relevant when compared to case
statements and nested if statements in procedural code. The more rules, conditions
and objects included in a decision process, the more valuable the rule engine is in
saving processing time.
Of course, rules do not exist in isolation. The results of one rule may influence many
others. The previous rule was conditioned in part by the customers account standing
being Overdue. It is likely that the determination of account standing comes from
other rules such as:

If
the Outstanding_balance of Customers account exceeds $5

and Customers Last_Payment_Date is earlier than today
2 months

Then
set the Account_standing of Customers Account to Overdue.
The rule engine maintains proper order dependencies between rules so that technical
developers do not need to write explicit code to specify which rules affect others.
Blaze Advisor provides very high performance for such data-directed reasoning (or
forward chaining) using optimized inferencing.
Optimized inferencing is the most advanced commercially available inference engine,
benchmarking more than 300% faster than its competitors. It was developed by
Charles Forgy, Ph.D. the inventor of the original Rete rule algorithm used in almost
all production inference-based solutions in the industry today. Optimized inferencing
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was developed specifically to make it possible for rule systems to deal efficiently with
large amounts of data as well as large numbers of rules. While other rule engines
slow down as rule complexity or transaction volume increases, optimized inferencing
scales effectively to provide a high-performance enterprise solution. Rule engines
based on the traditional Rete rule algorithm scale well as rules complexity increases,
but performance degrades with an increase in data volumes. Optimizing inferencing
is significantly more scalable and efficient, making the engine 10 times faster on large
rulesets with large quantities of data to assess.
For example, in benchmark testing conducted by FICO, the optimized inferencing
execution mode completed the standard Miss Manners 128 benchmark invocation
in just 0.32 seconds on a single CPU while the Waltz 50 benchmark was completed
in just 0.331 seconds. These represent 4,493 and 2,860 rules per second per CPU,
respectively. These are industry-leading numbers and can easily be compared across
platforms using the published test syntax. Additionally, Blaze Advisor exhibited near
linear scalability as the number of available processors was increased.
Graph showing the relative

performance of traditional
Rete and optimized Rete for
an increasing number of CPUs.
1.4
SERVICE INVOCATIONS PER SECOND
1.2
1.0
0.8
0.6
0.4
0.2
0.0
NUMBER OF PROCESSORS ENABLED

Platform 1 | Optimized Rete
Platform 1 | Traditional Rete
Platform 2 | Optimized Rete
Platform 2 | Traditional Rete
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FICO Blaze Advisor also supports a backwards chaining process that searches
for rules necessary to determine the conditions for a rule under consideration. For
instance, if the above rule determined that the account status was Overdue, it would
trigger the potential execution of the first rule. But for that rule to be processed, it is
also necessary to know the customers ID. We could specify a rule covering this need
as follows:

Whenever Customer_ID is needed
Then ask (Customer_Questions, Customer).
In the above rule, Customer_Questions specifies a pre-defined set of questions

designed to collect multiple data values at one time.
Sequential Execution
Not all groups of rules require a Rete network to track rule interdependencies
and maintain condition-matching tables for determining which rules to fire. Many
applications need to call upon sets of rules that are independent. For instance, an
automated system that checks applications for valid data needs to consider all
validation rules for each data element. It is more efficient in such cases to simply
evaluate each rules conditions in a fixed sequence. Each rule is evaluated to be either
true, in which case a corresponding action is triggered, or false, in which case it is
skipped and the next rule is checked. The results of a rules actions will not trigger a
previously evaluated rule to be reconsidered.
Blaze Advisor allows this type of sequential rule execution to be chosen for a given
ruleset, while other rulesets are evaluated with optimized inferencing. Sequential
execution is often useful in batch applications, where a limited number of rules are
invoked over and over for large numbers of data records. Each individual rule may
cause a data update or an exception to be logged, but an individual rule is unlikely to
change the conditions of another rule.
For the fastest possible execution of these types of rules, technical developers may
choose to identify a set of rules for execution through automatically generated code.
This code can be compiled and run on the host platform at native processing speeds,
with no additional load from rule engine features processing. Blaze Advisor can
generate code for both .NET and Java platforms with an option known as compiled
sequential execution.
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The sequential or batch tests both of which used real customer projects
attained a rule execution rate of 187,728 rules per second per CPU for complex
rules (representing 1,183,252 predicate evaluations per CPU per second) and
3,543,424 rules per second per CPU for simpler rules (representing 6,565,757
predicate evaluations per CPU per second). These numbers are extremely high for
real customer rules, as opposed to the if true then do nothing kinds of rules often
used for performance benchmarking. Additionally, Blaze Advisor exhibited near linear
scalability as the number of available processors was increased.
Graph showing the relative

performance of sequential and
compiled sequential for an
increasing number of CPUs.
25,000
SERVICE INVOCATIONS PER SECOND
20,000
15,000
10,000
5,000
0
1
NUMBER OF PROCESSORS ENABLED

Platform 1 | Compiled Sequential
Platform 1 | Sequential
Platform 2 | Compiled Sequential
Platform 2 | Sequential
For mainframe deployments, the critical performance issues are often not those
of rule execution, but of data marshalling and data access. Using a Java-based
solution in these circumstances can result in performance problems despite the very
high-speed execution of rules possible with the compiled sequential processing. To
address this issue, and allow direct access to data in COBOL copybooks and COBOL
sub-programs, Blaze Advisor provides an option to generate COBOL code to replace
the sequential execution of rules using the engine. This COBOL code can be used in a
standard mainframe environment to maximize performance and throughput.
Blaze Advisors combination of optimized inferencing, sequential execution and
compiled sequential execution on Java, .NET and COBOL gives rule architects the
flexibility to take advantage of added-value rule engine features when they provide
needed benefits and faster execution.
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Decision Services in Production

Blaze Advisor runs on any size server or mainframe. It can run as a Java application
or service, a .Net application or service or as a COBOL program. It can be invoked via
an explicit API call from an application, or you can register event listeners to watch for
changes in data or other asynchronous events to occur, triggering a corresponding
decision service (also known as rule service).
In order to handle high-volume production loads, Blaze Advisor is architected to run
multiple simultaneous rule execution processes in separate threads on both Java
and .NET. Each thread is dedicated to handling the complete rule service processing
for a service requestor, which may be a physical requestor, such as a web client in
an interactive internet application, or a logical requestor, such as a queued service
request in a batch application. Each thread is an instantiation of the Rule Engine
processing code held in memory. These threads are referred to as Rule Agents.
The number of Rule Agents and their system properties are configurable by the
system administrator for instance, restart/recycle policies for ending one service
request and beginning another. Administrators can even make configuration
parameters dynamic, based on load factors as seen by an application server. Each
Rule Agent that is running and available uses system memory, but adds more parallel
load capacity to the overall application. This architecture ensures that Blaze Advisor is
effectively and infinitely scalable to handle any desired load volumes, simply by adding
more processing threads, in addition to the supporting system resources.
Overseeing the synchronization of Rule Agents and service requests is a layer of
software known as the Blaze Advisor Rule Server. This software layer is built into
the product so that system programmers at the customer site do not need to write
custom code to manage Rule Agent availability, queue service requests and handle
other coordination tasks, such as rule updates. The Rule Server is also the level of
software that manages communications with application servers on the host system.
The Blaze Advisor Rule Server

manages and coordinates Rule
Agents and service requests.
Client 1
FICO Blaze Advisor
decision rules
management
system Rule Server
Client 2
Rule Agent
(Engine)
Rule Agent
(Engine)
Rules
Rule Agent
(Engine)
With this feature, customers can balance their hardware resource utilization against
their throughput needs. Rule Agents can be configured to pass rule execution auditing
information to files for later querying and reporting, and they can be used to support
remote debugging within the production system over workstations running the Blaze
Advisor IDE.
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Rule Redeployment
FICO Blaze Advisor has the capability to update rules at any time on the production
system, without recompiling the production application and without interrupting
production operations. The software layer that manages this updating is referred to
as the Blaze Advisor Deployment Manager. The Deployment Manager recognizes a
request to update production rules and works with the Rule Server to coordinate the
updates with rule service processing that is already in progress. A copy of the new rule
network is stored in memory. The Rule Server looks for the first Rule Agent that is or
becomes idle after the redeployment request. It blocks any new service requests from
accessing that Rule Agent while the Deployment Manager configures the Rule Agent
to use the new set of rules. As soon as the Rule Agent is updated, the Rule Server
allows new service requests to use it and the new rules. In the meantime, existing
service requests continue processing with the old rules so that they are not placed in
an inconsistent state. As each Rule Agent finishes its processing task, the Rule Server
and Deployment Manager update the Rule Agent to use the new rules and release the
rules for use by new service requests. Eventually, all Rule Agents are updated and the
Deployment Manager goes idle until it receives another rule update request.
Rule redeployment is
automatically managed
without interrupting
production operations.
Client 1
Client 2
New rules
FICO Blaze Advisor

decision rules
management
system Rule Server
Rule Agent
(Engine)
Rule Agent
(Engine)
Rule Agent
(Engine)
Rules
New rules
Deployment
Manager
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Generating Production Deployment Files

Once a decision service (also known as rule service) has been designed and tested
in the Blaze Advisor development environment, it needs to be exported to the
production environment. Blaze Advisor contains a set of automated utilities, referred
to as Quick Deployers, that create all the files necessary to deploy and access the
decision services from a production application. Quick Deployers ask a series of
questions that determine the specific configuration of the production environment
and the desired operation of the decision service. They can deploy decision services
as EJB session beans, Java Web Service and Java POJO Web Service for use with
most of the major J2EE application servers, such as Oracle WebLogic, WebSphere
and JBoss. If the selected application server supports the features, you can choose
to run as a Message-Driven Bean, a stateless service or a stateful (synchronous or
asynchronous) service. Quick Deployers can generate deployments for in-process
Java, Microsoft Transaction Server, JSR-94 rule engine interface compliance and web
services. Quick Deployers can also generate COBOL code or .NET deployments. In a
Microsoft environment, Blaze Advisor can access COM+ objects, and through them,
.NET objects. It also creates C# access code for Microsoft ASP .NET web services.
Configuration files include the ability to use ANT makefiles for technical developers.
Extending Blaze
Advisor with Decision
Simulator
Before you launch an important new product or change in strategy, its critical to
understand the likely effect on your business results. Validating that your rules will
fire as expected isnt enough you need to know whether your resulting decisions
will help or hurt your business.
The difficulty of estimating business impact can delay or even stop new rules from
being put into production, especially in areas that deal with customer strategies and risk
management. Business analysts want to know in advance how changes to their rules will
change the decisions they make, and how those decisions will impact their business.
Decision Simulator for Blaze Advisor makes it easy to add this capability to both new
and existing rules projects. It allows you to run historical data through your latest rules
and analyze the potential business impact prior to moving them into production. It
includes a flexible framework with pre-packaged templates and reports that make
it easy to set up simulations that allow business analysts to configure the data they
want to use, along with the rule results, business metrics and reports that they want
to include in their analysis.
With the Decision Simulator module you can:
Validate logic and assess the impact of rule changes prior to deployment
Avoid costly errors in strategies that might otherwise be missed
Accelerate approval for putting rule updates into production
Improve decisions by comparing alternative approaches
When creating a decision strategy for approving loans, for example, a credit officer will
ask: What change will this new strategy have on my ratio of accepts to declines? Will
this new strategy result in a different risk score distribution for accepted applicants?
What impact will this strategy have on my expected profits?
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Decision Simulator makes it

easy to analyze alternative
strategies side by side and
compare the results.
Baseline Strategy
Updated Strategy
Uses production Policy Underwriting rules
Uses updated Policy Underwriting rules
Tier 4
Tier 3
Tier 3
Tier 1
Tier 2
Tier 1
Tier 2
Value Tier
Count
Percent
Value Tier
Count
Percent
Tier 1
7000
38.89%
Tier 1
7000
38.89%
Tier 2
7000
38.89%
Tier 2
7000
38.89%
Tier 3
4000
22.22%
Tier 3
3000
5.56%
Total
18000
100%
Tier 4
1000
16.67%
Total
18000
100%
Decision Simulator can provide this type of information quickly in minutes. It gives
technical developers a point-and-click interface they can use to generate a simple
but powerful web-based user interface that makes it easy for business analysts to
configure and run simulations and reports to meet their specific needs.
Wizards guide the technical developer through the set up and management of
simulation projects that connect rule services to data sources, calculate additional
items of interest (such as profit), configure reports to analyze results and then provide
these capabilities to business analysts. They can then run their own estimations,
select the rules to invoke and data sources to use, and edit logic and values used in
business calculations.
For example, an insurance company using Blaze Advisor to automate its underwriting
rules could use Decision Simulator to identify whether the distribution of tier
assignments has been accidentally skewed or unexpectedly high discount levels have
been applied, and make the necessary improvements prior to deployment. A financial
company using Blaze Advisor to streamline the processing of credit card disputes
could use simulations to see if it would approve inappropriate claims or send too
many items for manual review, and fix these potentially costly issues.
Whatever your decision goals are, Decision Simulator will help increase your agility by
providing a safe environment to vet rule changes faster, while making it easier to compare
alternatives and improve the quality of strategies to better achieve your business objectives.
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Integrating Analytics
for Decision
Management
Blaze Advisor can also be extended with analytics using other tools within the FICO
Decision Management Suite. This integration of business rules with predictive analytic
models is a mainstay of decision management.
Blaze Advisor allows you to import decision trees from FICO Analytic Modeler
Decision Tree Professional and scorecards from FICO Analytic Modeler Scorecard
Professional, two SaaS products in the FICO Analytic Cloud for mining customer
data to create rules for segmentation, profiling and scoring.
Blaze Advisor also allows you to execute models from FICO Model Builder, a
complete workbench for developing and managing sophisticated predictive models,
including neural nets, segmentation models, decision tree models and predictive
scorecards. Model Builder is the platform FICO uses for all its predictive analytic
model development.
In addition, Blaze Advisor supports PMML (Predictive Model Markup Language)
models. Models supported include neural networks, linear and logistic regressions,
decision trees and scorecards. This white-box integration allows the models to
be viewed and edited in the Blaze Advisor environment, both in the IDE and in rule
maintenance applications.
The PMML import wizard

shows the import of a
predictive analytic model.
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Model Builder 7.5 has the ability to export its models and model entities as PMML
files. Model Builder also generates additional elements that describe models more
thoroughly in an extension to the standard PMML definitions, allowing Blaze Advisor
to render the model with a greater degree of precision.
Finally, FICOs optimization product, FICO Decision Optimizer, lets you optimize
business actions based on resource constraints, behavioral and economic measures,
and business objectives to develop optimized business rules for use in Blaze Advisor.
Blaze Advisor and

the IT Ecosystem
Blaze Advisor is a great complement to your existing IT ecosystems and to some of

the trends that influence the way your IT department builds information systems. In
particular, Blaze Advisor offers great value in a service-oriented architecture (SOA) and
for those adopting Business Process Management.
One of the major benefits expected from an SOA is an increase in business agility
due largely to a reduction in the time, cost and difficulty of making a change. The
definition of functionality as coherent components or services with well-defined
interfaces helps limit the impact of a change to a single service, making change easier
to control and execute. Clearly, some services will implement a business capability
that must be better able to adapt to change than others. These services are what
is meant by decision services (also known as rule services) and are typically best
implemented using Blaze Advisor. This allows the decision logic to be changed more
easily and safely, independent of the rest of the composite applications in which the
service appears.
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Organizations are using Business Process Management Suites (BPMS) to design

and build more and more processes. A BPMS focuses on how a particular process
should be carried out. It helps standardize processes, facilitates collaboration and
compliance, defines and manages workflow, automates steps, and provides activity
monitoring, alerts, process reporting and integration. What it does not do well is
decide what should be done. Using Blaze Advisor to automate decisions in the
new process can dramatically simplify it. You can often eliminate multiple steps in
favor of a single decision service (also known as rule service) within the process.
Simplify a process by automating

critical decisions.
Without rules
Withdrawn
Originator
Incomplete
New hire
Human
Resources
Resubmit
Allocate employee
number
Wait for
other
tasks
Deadline
warning
Withdrawn
e
Wait for
rst day
Day before
rst day
Ready
Supervisor
Induction
completed
Inducted
HR Assistant
Employee
started
Acknowledged
With rules
New hire
Human
Resources
New employee
processing
Review
hire records
Withdrawn
Wait for
rst day
Employee
started
Day before
rst day
If you manage decision services (also known as rule services) in this way, you
can also manage and deploy process and decision changes independently.
There is no reason the need to change a decision for example, product pricing
should require a change in the process steps for ordering it. When you have longrunning processes, keeping decisions separate also gives you the ability to change
work in progress. The process definition is fixed for a particular item of work at the
time that it is instantiated. For long-running processes, this can be a problem if the
business rules and analytic models are not current when evaluated. If you manage
decisions separately, and retrieve them when the process needs the decision,
they will always be current.
38
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Decision Management
Technology Benefits
An application architecture based on rules technology one that has logic managed
as an independent layer by dedicated services within the information architecture
enables an organization to more easily deploy business rules across multiple
applications and communication channels. Domain experts within specific business
units control business policies and rules while allowing IT resources to move to other
development tasks without recoding or risking miscommunications.
Companies using rules technology can expect benefits in areas such as:
Business agility
Straight-through processing
Compliance
Application development costs
Application maintenance speed and precision
Logic and rule reusability
Enterprise consistency
Personalization of the interactions with customers, prospects, agents and employees
Decision Management
Community
Join the Decision Management Community, the industrys first online community
focusing on decision rules management. In addition to providing technical developers
with 24x7 access to answers and advice, the Community features a trial download of
Blaze Advisor. After you try Blaze Advisor, you can discuss it with other users on the
ideas exchange, or submit your ideas for improvement.
To join the Decision Management Community

and download the Blaze Advisor demo,
visit https://community.fico.com/welcome.
39
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FICO (NYSE: FICO) is a leading analytics software company, helping businesses in

80+ countries make better decisions that drive higher levels of growth, profitability
and customer satisfaction. The companys groundbreaking use of big data and
mathematical algorithms to predict consumer behavior has transformed entire
industries. FICO provides analytics software and tools used across multiple industries
to manage risk, fight fraud, build more profitable customer relationships, optimize
operations and meet strict government regulations. Many of our products reach
industry-wide adoption such as the FICO Score, the standard measure of consumer
credit risk in the United States. FICO solutions leverage open-source standards and
cloud computing to maximize flexibility, speed deployment and reduce costs. The
company also helps millions of people manage their personal credit health.
About FICO
Learn more at www.fico.com.
FOR MORE INFORMATION

www.fico.com
www.fico.com/blogs
NORTH AMERICA
+1 888 342 6336
info@fico.com
LATIN AMERICA & CARIBBEAN

+55 11 5189 8267
LAC_info@fico.com
EUROPE, MIDDLE EAST & AFRICA

+44 (0) 207 940 8718
emeainfo@fico.com
ASIA PACIFIC
+65 6422 7700
infoasia@fico.com
FICO and Blaze Advisor are trademarks or registered trademarks of Fair Isaac Corporation in the United States and may be trademarks or registered trademarks of Fair Isaac Corporation in other countries.
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FICO Blaze Advisor decision rules management system

FICO Blaze Advisor

2016 Fair Isaac Corporation. All rights reserved.

Decision rules management, also called business rules management, is software

2016 Fair Isaac Corporation. All rights reserved.

Rules-Driven Business or Operational Application

Rule Engine/Rule Server

FICO Blaze Advisor

Applications could be:

A business application asks a decision service to perform some business function

2016 Fair Isaac Corporation. All rights reserved.

Benefits eligibility determination

Problem resolution procedures

Credit approval and limit determination

Product assembly configuration

Credit collection strategies

Interactions Between Business Processes, Applications,

2016 Fair Isaac Corporation. All rights reserved.

FICO Blaze Advisor decision rules management system

Predened Rule Services

Internal/External Data Sources

Rules Use Corporate Data Sources

2016 Fair Isaac Corporation. All rights reserved.

Object Model Import Wizards

2016 Fair Isaac Corporation. All rights reserved.

Blaze Advisor provides two methods for authoring rules:

Structured Rule Language

customer.debt > customer.assets

the status of the application of the customer is Declined.

the customers debt exceeds the customers assets

set the status of the customers application to Declined.

2016 Fair Isaac Corporation. All rights reserved.

Blaze Advisor SRL includes

If at least 2 children satisfy age < 8 then set discount to 0.25

Blaze Advisor SRL includes

_monthlyPayment is a real initially 0.0.

2016 Fair Isaac Corporation. All rights reserved.

Blaze Advisor decision tables

2016 Fair Isaac Corporation. All rights reserved.

Blaze Advisor scorecards

2016 Fair Isaac Corporation. All rights reserved.

2016 Fair Isaac Corporation. All rights reserved.

Blaze Advisor Business Terms

2016 Fair Isaac Corporation. All rights reserved.

Advanced Rule Features

Effective dates for rules

Event rules and

Decision Management for Business Analysts

2016 Fair Isaac Corporation. All rights reserved.

Business analysts use an

The lifecycle management component in the RMA enables authorized users to

Business analysts author rules in

2016 Fair Isaac Corporation. All rights reserved.

Building Custom Rule Maintenance Applications

2016 Fair Isaac Corporation. All rights reserved.

Templates specify what

The ability to customize the

2016 Fair Isaac Corporation. All rights reserved.

Repository Management and Version Controls

The Blaze RMA permits

2016 Fair Isaac Corporation. All rights reserved.

Identify and merge differences