Reading about The Ultimate in Service Automation: No Customer Required , it struck me how this is a wonderful case for employing business rules.

Check this excerpt.

The home washing machine will order its own repairs and the sprinkler system will call you on your cell phone to say the lawn service has broken one of its water spouts and it is now wasting water.

The car will tell you to pull over — its left rear tire is low on air — and, by the way, the service department at the local dealership has an opening on Thursday, if that’s convenient for you. There seems to be a problem since your garage sensors have reported oil drippings on its floor.

Very Interesting, actually. So much decision making needs to be done here, and me thinks this is a good business rules use case.

Lets check out some of these scenarios

1. Choose Store and Order Repairs. If repairs cost more than 100$, the Sprinkler will call you and ask you to authorize.You might want to set the limit to 50$ for the Electronic gadgets in your son’s room.
2. The Sprinkler calls you cell phone. If you are not there, it will call your wife, else shut down the water.
3. Your Car will Book a tentative appointment on Thursday with the Service Department because the Car has access to your calendar and it knows you are free. You can always cancel it.
4. Your Refrigerator will use a Walmart Web Service and order replenishments based on your requirements. If cost is greater than budget for the week, get confirmation from you through a simple form based interface on your Smart phone.
5. Your home environment manager will keep your room at 20 degrees, but keep your dog’s funnel at 25 because the Vet cautioned against the dog catching a Cold

The kind of service we are talking about here is possible only when the decision making capabilities are intelligent and advanced.

We are not talking about The Matrix here, but just a well-designed system with all the right interfaces available at the right price.

Additionally, the decision-making that is expected out of the devices would be unique to each home and person, and hence a customization need.
A good design approach is to externalize all the logic that drives these decisions out of the software that runs these devices.

And, Business Rules Engines and Business Rules Management Technology platforms offer the best available way for achieving such an externalization of business logic. BRMS are designed from the ground up for exactly this kind of design and logic externalization problems.

1. Whether you are thinking of a J2ME environment, or a Windows CE environment inside of the devices, BRMS are available for all these environments.
2. Upgrading business logic and rules, local customer specific customization are all easily done because only the business rules needs to be changed, and no other code would need to be modified.
3. New rule changes can also be centrally managed by the vendor using a simpler business user interface for modifying the business logic that drives the device from the central office.
4. It might even be possible to provide a advanced configuration and customization interface available through a home PC or a TV screen for setting and modifying customer/device specific business logic.

I don’t really have a clue how vendors in this space are thinking on this subject, but I sure would like to know.